Lockdown Artworks March 2020- September 2021

It's perhaps not come as a surprise to regular readers that I haven't had much to post about during the last 18 months. A succession of lockdowns, interspersed with brief periods of a wary release have taken their toll on many. We've had close family calls with Covid, but (touching wood!) it's not hit directly, but our son-in-law had a brush with it and it was a relief when the horrendous coughing went away without our daughter or granddaughter catching it.

About the only thing I could do was get out the guitar for some practice (a lot of new songs into my own personal repertoire!) and the pencils and paints out for the occasional bit of artwork whenever I felt like it - sadly not as often as the music.

For most of these I couldn't even sit in front of the view whilst drawing it. Most came from images from the Internet which (either by design or because I'm a sometimes rubbish artist) are not quite a total rip-off of someone else's photographic talent. Equally sadly though, I have no idea where many of them are... 3 May 2020. The real bridge had just the two arches. I added another to allow for a gap between the foliage on the left and right banks.

10 August 2020. Lockdown had eased somewhat and we had ordered a replacement window for the living room as the original one opened inwards and immediately hit the venetian blind. In other words we couldn't open it at all. It's the coldest room in the house, only getting a mere sliver of sunshine if it happens to be shining before we get up, but even so... Whilst the workmen had asked us not to breathe out at all or sit somewhere else in the house I sat in the conservatory, itself waiting for workmen to start wrecking and rebuilding it, and did this pencil sketch over a couple of hours. I added a boat - look carefully! - and changed the nature of the building.

7 September 2020. We visited friends down in the village of Dulcote near Wells in Somerset, who have a guest house. This is it. The White House used to be a village pub and coaching inn and has flagged floors, a delicious atmosphere, and a resident ghost who sits supping in the corner "just where you are sitting, John!", Mary commented. Luckily the only beings sitting on my lap were Mary's dog and then later, the cat. Apparently they don't usually show so much trust. "It's like having Doctor Doolittle in the house!" I was told. "Aw, rubbish" I scoffed, "By the way, the goldfish says he wants a worm treat..."

Later that same day, we headed out to Cheddar, where we found a little cafe to have lunch in. The caves were all closed, as were many of the small shops. Fran had a wander as I started another sketch of a row of tiny cottages. It started to rain as I was doing this, gently at first but after Fran had come back to me it came down in earnest and we upped sticks and found refuge under the awning of a pub beer garden where a Guinness helped me complete the sketch!

9 September 2020. The Bishop's Gatehouse, Wells. We ate our lunch overlooking the moat around the Bishop's Palace and afterwards went into the garden through this wonderful gatehouse. There was a picnic area just inside and I sat on one of a few stray chairs at the back of it to do this. A woman at a nearby table came across to talk to me and have a look. At one time I'd have been horribly self-concious at that and worried I'd do something to cock it up. In the event the two sides should really be the same width, the right hand one is much too wide.

18 October 2020. A quick sketch on a Sunday afternoon. I find it so hard to draw human figures, and know I should keep practising. This was quite an attractive photograph - wasn't hard to stare at it for an hour or so! Typically proportions went a bit haywire, her back is a bit long and the miniskirt she was wearing looks more like a pair of shorts...

Miss Franny bought me a huge box of pencil crayons for Christmas and I sat down on the 27th December for around three hours, doing this study of Venice's Ponte Rialto in my A4 sketch book.

29 December 2020. Determined to get a drawing of a human figure right... I do one that looks all wrong! She has a longer back than the previous attempt! Friends of the male variety tried to console me by commenting on my mastery of buttocks...

4 January 2021. An afternoon's sketching of the view from Portofino's square in front of the Church of St George. This is looking in the opposite direction to the famous view of Portofino's approach and harbour and is from one of my own photographs.

25 January 2021. The castle came from an online photo and I've no idea where it is. If anyone recognises it, please leave a comment and let me know.

12 February 2021. Port Mogan on Gran Canaria from one of my own photos, during the post Christmas 2020 lockdown. Pencil in the A4 sketchbook from one of my photos taken in 2007. People! Not looking too horrendous!

24 February 2021. Human figures starting to look a bit more real, though the right eye widened a bit. In actual size this eye was only about 2mm from top to bottom so it was just a slight slip with the crayon. Two days later, the consensus on Facebook was that I should extend down and add the feet. This was a huge mistake as I was already perilously close to the bottom of the A4 sheet and I ended up giving the poor girl tiny feet on very short below-knee legs... You are not seeing that version!

I bought myself a new easel and spent a frustrating few days trying to assemble the thing. The bloke who drilled one piece didn't talk to the bloke drilling screw holes in the piece that was supposed to afix to it and screws just went through the top piece and said a firm "Whoa!" when they reached solid wood halfway through. However it finally got done and I attached an A2 piece of paper and tested out some new pastels on it with this picture of a Cotswolds scene.

30 April 2021. I had bought a set of sable brushes for watercolours and this was my test piece using the largest No.12 brush throughout. Watercolours are more difficult than pastels methinks! This was done on a piece of card slightly smaller than A4. Perhaps I needed a bit more room to work on!

29 July 2021. Going slightly stir crazy at all the time spent at home, we booked a few days down in Great Yarmouth for what should have left a few weeks gap after the release of all restrictions. In the event, the 21st June target got pushed back a month and we found ourselves acting as pioneers. We found that no cafes in the town would let you sit inside no matter what the weather (though no such problem with restaurants) and in nearby Cromer the cafe where we had lunch denied customers use of their toilets sending me and a woman at the next table in her 80s on a long walk with dodgy directions to the nearest public toilets. How inhuman and despicable can you get? If you sell food and drink for consumption on your premises, denying people the most basic human function is akin to torture and abuse. You should remain closed if you feel you cannot allow customers to use a toilet. I was so mad I considered pissing all over the floor behind their counter... This is the Harbour Master's office at Oulton Broad on our last day before coming home.

8 August 2021. One of my friends - an ex-boss in fact - who lives in France, took a few photos of the town of Poundenas on a trip out. I saw these on FaceBook and chose this one to have a go at. The town has several other viewpoints that just cry out for the same treatment. When I get the time...

Tuesday 24 August 2021. A morning walk into Poulton, since 2019 our home town a couple of miles inland from Blackpool, with Miss Franny and our granddaughter, Grace. I sat in the churchyard whilst the other two looked round the shops and brought back ice cream and coffees. It felt so good to be sitting outside and sketching a view from in front of me again. Plus a couple of people commented as they walked past which was nice too. It did cost me dinner in the nearby New Penny cafe.

Thursday 26 August 2021. We took Grace to the zoo for the afternoon and I sat sketching this building - the old airport clubhouse with observation tower from the time when Blackpool's airport was sited here in the 1930s. Amy Johnson flew from it and is remembered in the name of a road near the current airport at Squires Gate. The zoo opened here in 1972, the honours being carried out by much-loved TV presenter Johnny Morris, who rode in on the back of an elephant in pouring rain. This area was once shared by the elephants, rhinos and giraffes (though different species were kept well apart). The zoo no longer has rhinos and the giraffes got a new purpose built environment and more recently the last remaining elephant, Kate, was also moved into a very large new environment where she has been joined by more elephants. The camels have moved into residence here now and this sketch marks my very first attempt to draw an animal from real life. They don't stand still all that much...

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Sketches from Outside the UK, Part 5

Here we are, ten months of Covid-19 lockdowns, hardly leaving the house and moving from one hobby to another trying to stay sane! So it's time to revisit the sketch book and bring you up to date on a few drawings done in happier days!

In 2018 we were on the first cruise of the Marella Explorer after it joined the Marella fleet. A far bigger ship than we were used to and whilst we both enjoyed it, I prefer the smaller ships for the way in which you can strike up relationships with fellow passengers. On the larger ships you just don't bump into them as often. We joined an excursion that included Sorrento and Amalfi and it was in this second of these lovely places that I started to sketch the hillside in the A4 sketchbook, but then having to stop because of rain. Luckily for some reason I had started to draw from right to left against my usual habit so I was left with an A5 view which would probably have got smudged if I had carried on drawing to the left anyway.

Later in 2018 we were back on one of our favourite ships, Marella Celebration on a cruise called Venetian Vistas. Its first port of call was a place called Bar in Montenegro, where we strolled along the seafront, stopped in a bar in Bar for a drink and then sat on the low wall along the beach walk to do this. A very relaxing day. I could do with a few days like this right now come to think of it...

Korcula in Croatia. I have never yet been to a place I disliked in Croatia. In fact I'd go further and say there hasn't been anywhere in Croatia that I've been where I wouldn't jump at the chance to revisit. And indeed this was our second visit to this Croatian island. We had walked around the city, criss-crossed the hill from different directions, sat for a much-needed drink for a while and then braved the burning sun to do this sketch of the landing stage and martello tower (and to do the lamp post the disservice of making it lean over - it didn't really).

The following May we found ourselves in Monte Carlo for the day, within a few short days of the annual Grand Prix race. We were able to walk along the pit lane and enjoy the most expensive drink of Sprite I've ever had... I drew this from the side of the ship once I'd recovered from the walk and checked my bank balance had the funds to cover the Sprite!

Two days later we were in Livorno, Italy and went for a boat trip around the canals in the pouring rain. We had no coats and, being the last in the queue, we were sitting outside the limits of the awning that didn't quite cover the entire boat. Photography and sketching were just about impossible in the circumstances and I did this one later to accompany the blog entry of the day. The canals were lined with moored boats - something I find very hard to draw. So I left them out...

The next day we were in France at a lovely place called Sanary-Sur-Mer and I was feeling a little ashamed at not attempting any boats at all. This place was likewise full of the blooming things, so I picked just one and made myself include it in a drawing. I returned to our cruise ship later that day feeling full of self-righteousness and goodwill. Though it's a bloody awful sketch really...

Towards the end of the cruise, Barcelona gave me a better chance of redeeming myself. I surprised myself with this one to be honest and had I gone on to practice drawing a boat a day for a few weeks after this then I should have got over my reluctance to draw them. But I didn't and so I am... Still...

In September 2019 we were on our other favourite Marella ship the Marella Dream. Both the Dream and the Celebration have been sold and scrapped during the horrible year that was 2020 and we will miss them and like so many other fellow travellers are hoping with all our hearts that we can meet up with our friends, the entertainers Tomas and Maris who sang on these two ships for almost ten wonderful years. One of the joys of smaller ships is that they can visit lesser known and smaller ports and if you don't want the restrictions of an organised day out to famous places, you can just mooch about a town and feel more a part of life in whatever country you are in. This is Propriano on the island of Corsica. It gave us a perfect morning's walk along the seafront where we sat on a low but very hot wall while I drew this. Well I sat on it - Miss Franny upped sticks and left me to shuffle about on a nearby bench which had a smidgeon of shade, but which pointed the wrong way for me to draw. The buildings top right are a cemetery and the scrub bottom right were my imagination as it was a car park in real life. Afterwards we walked back along the roads into the town itself, stopping at a pavement cafe and just enjoying the bustle and swapping the occasional greeting with other cruisers who walked past.

Palamos in Spain has a beautiful beach but a coastline like Blackpool's - fairly straight and therefore not much in the way of rocks, headlands or mountains to make it all that scenic. It has some curved rows of arches every now and then to create a framework for viewing any antics on the beach and a cannon or two for bringing them to an abrupt end if they should get out of hand. By looking at an acute angle through them I managed to get a bit of land in. The shopping streets of the town near the harbour are pleasant to walk through and are waiting for a return visit so I can have a go at capturing those in the sketchbook.

I had long wanted to visit Portofino in Italy and on the September 2019 cruise we finally got to go there. The crowds made sketching almost impossible, I took photographs during the few seconds I managed to get to the front of the press of people and I did this drawing from one of them during 2020's lockdown. It's actually one of the views taken from the ferry from nearby Santa Margherita as we approached Portofino. I dare say I'll attempt more from these photos in due time - a watercolour from the famous Portofino viewpoint is included already in this blog article.

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Sketches from Outside the UK, Part 4

Continuing my series of articles about my sketches done on holidays abroad, here is another collection spanning the years 2013-2017.

The first is of one of my favourite ports of call on the French Riviera: Villefranche. We were cruising with friends for the first time and, having walked all the way around the bay, sat in a café for a coffee with a view of the sweep of the bay.

Later in the year we took another trip, visiting Rhodes which I sketched from a high viewpoint on the ship itself. I ignored all the modern buildings but included the medieval ones.

Somehow I skipped a year in 2014 - the trips we did mustn't have had enough free time or I just didn't have the muse (now where did I put my muse...?) or whatever. So we jump to 2015 and this one was done on our second trip with David and Jeannie, from Zorba's café bar on the Greek island of Mykonos.

The girl who served us was looking at the sketch as it developed so I took her email address and emailed a scan of it once we got back, getting a thank you email in return. I did this the same afternoon on the ship, looking at the photo I had taken on the tiny screen on the back of my camera.

Sitting on a corner of the harbour at Chania on the island of Crete, I sketched this scene. We took one of the glass-bottomed boats out to see the sea life just off a nearby small island.

In 2016 we went with our daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter to Disney World in Florida and stayed in the Caribbean Beach Resort. I did a few sketches there in the all-too-brief moments of calm and relaxation. Mainly with an early morning mug of coffee on the table in front of me.

Fish could be seen swimming below me and large birds with long bills and some white storks were flying or hopping about, looking for scraps left by those who opted to eat breakfast outside.

This was another view of the resort's lake, done on our last morning between breakfast and the time we were due to catch a bus to the airport to come home. A cheerleader came jogging round and said "That's really pretty!" as she passed. Someone else came along and stared at it before saying doubtfully, "Is that bit the water?"

This was done as we neared the end of the two-week stay. The weather was far hotter than we were used to and with two weeks of walking all day I lost half a stone over the holiday. This day I decided to just take the chance of a half-hour's sit down and sketched one of the shops in Walt Disney World. The chap next to me kept looking but didn't say anything. He nodded though. "Does it look anything like?" I asked eventually, a bit unnerved by his silent scrutiny. He tapped his ear. "Deaf!" he whispered...

I had done one of this carousel at the time in pencil, but wasn't too happy with it. Once we got home I did this one with coloured pencils.

After the hectic nature of the Florida holiday, when we joined the Thomson Celebration cruise ship later that year I was determined to have a more relaxing holiday. We joined the ship in Corfu and I did this from the Promenade Deck on Deck 9.

It was on this cruise that we first visited Santorini. We had done four previous cruises with this fabulous island on the itinerary but never before managed to get there. It is prone to cross winds that make it dangerous for ships to enter the lagoon in the centre of this once massive island. It is in fact a volcano and blew itself almost out of existence a mere 3,600 years ago, give or take a week or two. By legend this was the famed destruction of Atlantis.

Later in the week we visited Bodrum in Turkey. Formerly known as Halicarnassus it was the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - the Mausoleum of Mausolus. He ruled here from 377 BCE and his tomb was so beautifully decorated that his name became synonymous for all above ground level tombs. It is not recorded how it was eventually destroyed, but by the time the Knights Templar of St John arrived in 1402 they were to record it as being in ruins. It had been standing apparently in the 1100s as it was mentioned by Eustathius in his commentary on The Iliad. Many of its stones were used in the building of the castle. The site of the mausoleum is known and can be visited - though at the time of our visit we didn't know that.

Another from that cruise in 2016. We revisited Chania in Crete and I chose a different part of the harbour to sketch.

In 2017 we took a cruise on Thomson Celebration once more, sailing from Newcastle for a two-week cruise visiting Norway, Iceland, and the Faroe and Shetland Isles. This is Stavanger old town in Norway, as seen from the warmth of a lounge window on the ship. We were docked quite close!

Isafjord (Isafjordur in Icelandic) is down a fjord on the north west coast of Iceland that juts out from the corner of the mainland. This was drawn from the Celebration's coffee shop on Deck 5.

Once more in Norway, later towards the end of the cruise, this is Bergen.

Later the same day, once again from the comfort of the ship as we waited to sail away with just one last port of call to make before sailing back down the North Sea to Newcastle.

Our second cruise in 2017 took us up the Adriatic Sea and I spent a couple of hours sitting at the far end of the port of Dubrovnik, ignoring most of the many boats and ships in the harbour, but including the Thomson Dream on which we were sailing and the Karaka a wooden sailing ship. By the time of our next cruise the following year the name Thomson would have gone and the fleet of ships rebranded as Marella.

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Sketching Britain 5

This post brings us up to date so after this you'll have to wait until I get drawing a bit more!

In 2009 we were invited to a work colleague's wedding reception which was held in the impressive Durham Castle. The morning after, before heading homewards, Fran wanted a look round the shops and I went down to draw this sketch of the castle from the opposite bank of the river. It was done in my A5 pad and whilst it rained a bit during the sketching, I managed to dodge the ferocious bits under a nearby bridge.

Brougham Castle, done from one of my own photographs. There's another entry about this sketch, linked from the Index Page, that shows some of the stages I went through.

For a few years, my sketching was limited to holidays and were all done abroad so we move to 2015 when we stayed for a weekend with an old friend and colleague at her guest house in Dulcote, near Wells in Somerset. The surroundings, Dulcote village and the historic house which was the guest house made it a great weekend and this was done from Mary's summer house in the garden not long after we arrived. The White House, Dulcote - I heartily recommend it!

Whilst we were there, there was just one afternoon when the weather decided to do the nasty on us. We had been to Glastonbury in the morning and in the afternoon had driven to Cheddar Gorge, but the weather drove us into a crowded café where we dried off a little and sat trying to identify old Golden Age Hollywood stars from a collection of cigarette cards from the 1940s. I drew this later from a photo and added the cyclist because there was a cyclist staying at the guest house who had cycled up the gorge the previous day.

Later that year we took a long weekend down to the haunt of teenage and early family holidays in Newquay and tried out the hills on our legs which were now 40-50 years older! This was Perranporth beach with the line of cliffs down the southern side where the sea has carved them into some interesting shapes including arches.

We called one night at Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor and had our evening meal there. The talking (swearing...) parrot we remembered was no more sadly, but the place still has tons of atmosphere. I remembered our daughter being most indignant there one year as she was reading Daphne du Maurier's book and came across a plaque that contained a huge spoiler for her!

This sketch of Polperro was a sketch done in two halves due to rain. As we dashed into a nearby café, sketch book flapping, loaded down with pencils, buckets, spades - well perhaps not, I was 61 at the time... - the café owner caught sight of it and said "Ooh! That's good!" Luckily I managed to get back to almost my original spot to finish it after lunch when the sun had once more made an appearance. No one actually came to talk to me, but I overheard some very nice comments from behind me. If this had been any other country I'd have been trying to understand conversations in a few different languages.

This one of Towan beach in Newquay - the beach with the island - was done with the only company being a hopeful seagull. Every now and then it chittered at me, but as I wasn't eating and had no food on me and mostly as I never feed seagulls because they get aggressive if taught to expect food from humans, it remained disillusioned about the human race. It was bitterly cold which may explain the lack of any other people about the place but the solitude was worth it as we went from there into a restaurant that served the most enormous steak in ale pie. I was still filling in the darker bits and the barman, wandering past, did a double take and said "Have you drawn that???" in an astonished tone. Meanwhile the seagull was tapping at the window and shouting "You bastard!" as we tucked into the pie and chips.

You win some and you lose some... A bitterly cold February morning in Bolton without either camera or sketch book prompted me to find a photo on the Internet and draw Bolton's town hall from that. Heaven only knows what happened to any attempt at perspective, that tower looks like the house that Jack built... Fail...

Saturday 11 August 2018. I was back sketching outdoors in situ again. The Windmill Theatre in Great Yarmouth on a scorching hot day. It took a couple of hours and I had to make up the interior of the ground floor as it is now an indoor Crazy Golf(!) Done with a local who kept coming for a look then going home to his house on the next street for another can of beer. This at 10:00 am. He was ok, if a little drunk and the smell of beer meant he attracted the wasps and not me... Late on in the process he disappeared then came back with a load of old postcards of the town to show me. Sadly none showed the front of the theatre, but then I imagine it would have been covered in billboards with portraits and lettering and I hate doing lettering!

Done on Boxing Day 2018 whilst we had a short lull, waiting for family to arrive. It was done in my A4 sketchbook which had been a Christmas present the previous year and was done from an old photo of Thirlmere in the Lake District.

And finally for this time, here's Hastings on the south coast, well known for sea, fun and invading Normans. (Get off, Norman!) Drawn a mere 13 weeks ago during that rather intermittent summer we had this year. We were staying in Eastbourne and had taken a bus to Hastings. They made me take it back...

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