Nice and Villefranche

Thursday 24 May 2018. We anchor in the water off Villefranche and use the tender boats to disembark. We are on a half-day excursion to Nice which includes a ride on a road train.

The coach takes us on a time consuming tour of Nice's back streets however before the small train and thus our time on another tour disappears with little time to see the coastline of Nice. You know... the thing that people go to Nice to see... Once on the road train we do trundle along the coast for a short while, passing the harbour where a Club Med ship seems to be spraying water over any passing small boats!

The road train carries us on a winding climb up a hill to this viewpoint which was absolutely stunning. It might have been even better had the coach trip through the back streets not put me in a rather - how shall I say - somewhat exasperated frame of mind! We would have simply caught a train here from Villefranche to do whatever we wanted with our time, but we had been warned that they are suffering from industrial action and at best are unreliable for the day. Added to which it was Grand Prix weekend in Monaco, just the other side of Villefranche so trains going back would have been crowded even if running.

Looking a little closer to our viewpoint. The back end of the road train can be seen to the left.

Looking inland from our hilltop vantage point past another of those wonderful continental cast iron lamp posts.

Eventually the train returned us to a spot just behind the seafront and we wondered for a nano-second whether to join the guide on her walking tour - er... no... We crossed the road to the seafront with a sigh of freedom.

Amazingly the guy on the cycle rickshaw was from Yorkshire! We turned down his offer to take us around Nice's back streets however... Apart from having had our fill of back streets, even with ducking the walking tour, we had only 25 minutes left before meeting the coach to return to Villefranche.

We bought ice creams and sat breathing in the ozone for a bit then set off back towards the meeting place. I quite liked the grassed tracks that the local trams had.

Our route took us uphill a little bit, This was one of Nice's shopping streets just behind the seafront.

This was our rendezvous point. Just throwing a little appropriated French-English word in there. This is Place Masséna, nicely (see what I did there?) situated just a two minute walk from the Promenade, the old town district and the modern town centre. The statue is that of Neptune the sea god.

Another view of Place Masséna. Since the tramway was constructed in 2007 the square is mostly pedestrianised apart from a road running around the statue, where the road trains run from. The trams run on electricity from overhead wires but when passing through this and other areas of beauty, they drop their pantographs to roof level and run on batteries so that the main squares of Nice are not disfigured by poles and overhead cables.

Back on the coach and heading back to Villefranche. We have decided to have lunch in Villefranche itself before heading back to the ship.

We walked along the sea wall to the restaurant we had been to before with our friends David and Jeannie and from where I had sketched the view in 2013. This time we had a meal and very nice it was too. Just a burger and chips but I was asked how I'd like the burger cooking. So refined, the French! If they had been local I'd never be away!

My sketch from 2013.

Reminders of sketches and paintings were everywhere! This was the view from the small harbour from where the tender boats to and from the ship were operating.

And my oil pastel painting from last year inspired by this view.

What? You enjoyed the photo of me on the balcony the other day so much that you want another? Ok.

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Highlights of The Mediterranean, 18-25 May 2013 Index Page

A series of articles covering our holiday with David and Miss Jeannie (Creeping Bentgrass on tour!) on the Thomson Dream cruise ship. We'll be calling at Palma, Majorca > Day at Sea > Ajaccio, Corsica > Civitavecchia, Italy > Livorno, Italy > Puccini's house at Torre del Lago, Italy > Pisa, Italy > Villefranche, France > Barcelona, Spain. At some point we'll be treated to a storm with storm force eleven winds and a somewhat rough sea with decks closed and lots of people turning green.

I usually take something like 300 photographs during a week's cruise. David came back with 2000... I have therefore had to be ruthless when it came to selecting photos for these articles unless I was willing to write - and you, dear readers, were willing to read for as long as it took us to live through the cruise!

Each of the photographs below will take you to the related article and photographs.

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First Attempt At Art Using Oil Pastels

Yes I know I've been a bit (a bit???) quiet on the blog this year. But this may go some way as to explain why. For some time I've been producing my pencil sketches a few every year, mainly done whilst on holiday. Last year I tried a couple of water colours over the top of existing sketches. I was fancying having a go at something more spectacular and challenging.

And this is it. An oil pastel painting based on a photograph of Villefranche which lies between Nice and Monaco on the French Mediterranean coast. There was a certain amount of preparatory work for this. I had no easel. I had no pastels... And to make it worthwhile it had to be done on a larger scale than anything I've attempted before. So the bits and pieces of equipment and pastel sticks were bought and a pad of pristine white paper in an A2 size sketch pad. I started work on the 24 January 2017 and finished yesterday morning on 3 March 2017. Not that I've worked eight hours a day every day, though... I've stuck little bits on my FaceBook account as I've been going along and a friend suggested I should collate them into an article. So this is it...

24 January 2017. The easel and paper is set up in the conservatory which will give me enough light to work with. I had been wanting to draw a colour sketch of Villefranche for some time so trawling through my photos of various visits over the years I printed one out onto A4 paper and used that as a guide. At this stage there was no real anticipation of producing anything wonderful and I didn't really think I'd be able to fit a load of detail in using pastels, but drew my usual style of pencil sketch anyway, but without any shading or detail such as foliage.

29 January 2017. This being the equivalent of four A4 sheets, there was no way of scanning it so I had to take photos of each stage. Whilst it was in the pure black and white (or grey of pencil) stage this meant I had to tweak the photo quite a bit to bring out the detail at the expense of the paper going dark and looking dirty! It took five days to get to this stage. A lot of the work got done in five minute bursts whilst I was waiting for the kettle to boil... Even as just a pencil sketch, this was still the largest thing I've ever done and I was starting to realise that I didn't want to spoil it!

3 February 2017. Very little had happened this week in fact, as other things were going on that took my attention. I had decided that I was going to use the pastels even though I might lose detail and to test this out a bit I started with the orange building on the left hand side. I tried it out on a piece of A4 paper first to gauge my technique and adjust if necessary. I bought a set of blending sticks which looked a bit like paintbrushes, but with rubber (like pencil erasers) instead of bristles at the end. I was also trying out techniques for the sky area. The first go was a real mess and I bought a cheap book on painting with pastels and tried out on another sheet of paper the techniques they described.

4 February 2017. After a couple of goes on an A4 sheet - one good, one bad - I thought "What the heck!" and went for it. I also tried out an area of distant hillside and a tiny building in the distance.

5 February 2017. I spent the morning adding in defining details to the upper storeys of the orange building and then tackled mountainside. The latter also has a few small buildings here and there. That was it for the day as we'd been invited out to celebrate a 60th birthday. Next steps will be to complete the background and do the cliffs towards the right-hand side. That was going to be another suck-it-and-see test on a fresh piece of paper before committing to the actual painting. I found that small items such as roofs and windows on the background buildings were best done with a tiny smudge of colour and then using one of the blending tools. For thin black lines I chose a blending tool shaped like a paintbrush and applied minute bits of paint by rubbing the blender on the top of the stick of pastel. I got enough pigment to do a millimetre at a time, two at the most. The hillside was done using brown and two shades of green and drawing intersecting wavy lines before blending the colours with my finger. Over on the left hand side a dark red was also added to the mix.

9 February 2017. A close up of the detail in the top left corner. Yet a third shade of green was used quite thickly to suggest trees and foliage. A bit tentatively at first with a couple of lines to suggest footpaths or roads along the mountainside, but then the yellow building got done and the cypress trees at the side of it and they were a sort of happy stumbling on something that made me use that shade quite a lot afterwards for trees and foliage!

11 February 2017. My FaceBook update went: I did quite a bit yesterday and have added to it today, but now getting ready to go hospital visiting and as it's half-term next week and we will have Grace a few days it might have to go upstairs out of the way! More hillside done, more trees and foliage added. A few more buildings done - I learned the hard way you can't mix colours easily. I'm sure you'll be able to spot where I found this out... Lower storeys of the orange building started and the car which Miss Franny said had to be blue. Suspicious now... I've never had that blue a car...

13 February 2017. I spent the previous day on the left hand side, working towards the lower part of the painting. The sea was going to be left until the very end. For one thing it was going to be complicated and needed a lot of layering of colours which I wasn't too sure of as yet. And for another, I suspected it may have to be done as one complete portion to avoid any obvious vertical breaks that might occur if I attempted t do it bit by bit. And for a third and final thing - proving that you can start two consecutive sentences with the word "and" - I always work top left to bottom right so that my hand doesn't smudge bits I've already done. I wasn't yet ready to make myself a long dowel with a small bean bag on the end to act as a hand rest whilst painting over bits already done.

Today I took a very deep breath and headed for the cliffs. One of those "this could ruin it" moments. I used grey and a dark ochre and smeared them together vertically, using the ochre to suggest soil seeping from ledges. I figured they were too far in the distance to start drawing cracks in the rockface so instead used small amounts of black to suggest the shadows caused by clefts and breaks in strata. Adding foliage along the ledges helped the illusion. I was not particularly keen on the far-too-pink building and friends agreed, with one suggesting it stood out like "a dog's..." well, never mind... I will see if I can tone it down any! Half Term starts and I move the easel upstairs for a week where it won't get knocked over accidentally.

21 February 2017. It's back downstairs and being worked. I have to hold my hand up and admit I never expected to manage this amount of detail. The sea still awaits to trip me up though. And the windows and shutters are getting smaller all the time now... I put a darker red pigment over the pink and managed to tone it down a bit.

25 February 2017. By now I was spending more time on it each day as it was starting to get quite exciting! Each time it's noticeable that the white untouched area is shrinking. A couple more foreground buildings to the right, another swathe of hillside and the large building - university, school or just apartments? - done. At the bottom, the sea wall extended and I swapped some concrete for a more picturesque Lake District style wooden jetty. Well they should have done it proper in the first place... The inflatable boat has been done and I gave a huge sigh of relief afterwards I can tell you! It will probably need a bit of tidying after the sea goes round it. And that's another serious psyching-up moment to come!

28 February 2017. The previous three days saw me just about reach a landmark. The next mark will be a seamark! The last few hotels have been done, the remaining buildings on the hillside and what looks like the old town walls at the right hand side (in the real Villefranche they support the railway!) had me trying a new technique for blending colours. I found it very hard to get a suggestion that it was made from large blocks of stone... Now the sea beckons and I need to experiment on fresh paper to get a technique for mixing horizontal splashes of colour for the sea with the verticals of the reflected colours of buildings etc. I commented on FaceBook "The next time you see it, I will either have finished or ripped it up and you will see it in the bin..." I'm pleased to say a number of people begged me not to rip it up!

3 March 2017. Sorry about the copyright notice, but despite the copyright notice already on this blog to the left it is absolutely amazing how many times my photos from this blog turn up without people having the courtesy to mention where they came from. I allow use for non-profit purposes but ask that I am credited. Most people now assume copyright doesn't matter, I've even had someone suggest I was deliberately spoiling his book by refusing to allow him to simply copy the tiny photo on here for a book without any consideration and he dismissed my suggestion that I would need to provide a large scan and then clean it up because old negatives and slides will be dirty. Duh... The Internet works at 72 dots per inch. Books work at least at 600 dots per inch. If you just lift an image for a book off here you could hope to get a good quality image if it was printed no more than half an inch wide. In the end after I refused, he protested that he was going to offer me a discount off his book (it was going to sell priced around £40!!!) Anyway, please bear in mind that I spent the 1980s and 90s freelancing to magazines. My photos were taken when it cost money to take photos and they were taken with the intention of selling them. So sorry about the copyright notice over the pic and the slight rant...

I had been seriously driving myself nuts about starting the sea area. I did a Google search for pastel paintings water reflections video and watched a few to see how people had done them. There are some really good videos about to help artists. So on the 2nd of March at tea time I started drawing horizontal lines of colour onto the sea area. The colours were all of those that would appear reflected from the relevant area above the waterline and positioned where I thought the top of the reflection would start. I ended up with a mess of horizontal lines of colour, lots of white space and my heart in my mouth.

Then where I had room, I used a finger and smeared downwards to the bottom of the paper. An artist friend - I'm going to name her, Christine (Katie) Astbury - gave me loads of help through private messages over FaceBook all the way through this artwork and never protested or dodged any of the naive and sometimes complex questions I fired at her, thank you xxx

Where I didn't have room to use my finger to smear the colour such as in the angles of sea wall and jetty, Katie suggested using cotton buds and that worked a treat. So now I had some quite vivid stripes of colour which looked rather startling. I had to tone them down and then make it appear as though they were reflections on water. I toned them down by scraping vertically downwards with a palette knife which took off quite a bit of pigment, smoothed out any lumps and gave me a fresh working surface to work on the water - as it were. This was achieved using three shades of grey, a silver-blue, a mid and a dark grey to create both short horizontal lines and random wavy lines but only straying from the horizontal a little. The dark grey was used to darken areas of deeper water away from the sea wall. Some white was added to suggest spray or eddies of water around the boats and the sea wall.

I started this as an experiment and never expected to end up with something like this. I'm every bit as flabbergasted as anyone else has professed to be. But quite pleased... My son-in-law has brought me a couple of sets of oil paints and brushes. Miss Franny is looking at the conservatory floor and looking pensive...

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Sketches of Foreign Parts 2

I am, I must confess, a little tardy with this follow-up entry. The first in this series was published in December 2013... But hey! Better late than never! Oh and the "foreign" bit only applies if you do not live in any of the countries depicted... There are several places depicted where I'd quite like to live come to think of it!

El Caldera de Taburiente on the island of La Palma, on of the Canary Islands. The caldera is a massive crater, 17 miles (28km) in diameter. (Disconcertingly another guide on a later visit said it was 17 miles around... One of them was out by a factor of 3.142...) It is said to have been eroded out rather than being a volcanic crater. It reaches depths of 3500 feet (724m). I drew this in 2005 on our second cruise and had borrowed the pencil off the Receptionist onboard! One of the very few sketches I've drawn with a normal pencil rather than my propelling pencil.

This is a bit of a weird one. In 2007 we called at Valencia on the old Island Star cruise ship and we took a trip that included a visit to the Sagunto caves. You are taken through the caves on a boat and it is too dark to take photos and flash would blind the boatman leading to bumped heads on overhanging rock or greater disaster. I bought some postcards of the caves (some of which hilariously show boatmen covering their eyes...) and drew this from one of them after we had got home.

I remember we heard a really disturbing echoing boom whilst we were underground on the boat. "What was that?" gasped a young girl.
"Orcs!" I whispered kindly.

This was also done from a photo of Taormina in Sicily when I was trying to get over my reluctance to draw people. Well, not so much reluctance because I don't want to - it's more reluctance because I am hideously bad at drawing lifelike figures... This did help a little and a friend who is also an artist praised it saying that as a quick impression of a place and atmosphere it had some merit. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to produce photographically correct portraits though!

Santa Margherita in Italy, drawn on site. One of the ones I am most proud of - it stands up to the photo quite well. An old chap who was looking over my shoulder called his grandson over and the lad, who was probably around twelve or thirteen, took one look and went "Whoaaaagh!!!" in admiration. A quite satisfying moment, I must thrash myself with a rusty chain...

We took my Mum on a cruise in 2008 and called at Villefranche - one of my favourite spots on the south coast of France. I drew this whilst Fran took Mum around the small market. There comes an age where old people should have reins like you can get for toddlers... We lost her twice that holiday, having to go hairing after her once having spotted her wandering off in the opposite direction and once when she had taken it into her head to hide behind the back of a market stall to try something on...

Mahon on Menorca is a lovely place and the approach from a cruise ship is just gorgeously picturesque with lots of whitewashed houses facing the long inlet that you sail up. This was a very steep hill with a set of steps cutting the corner. An interesting exercise as far as perspective goes. Electricity was distributed by passing a cable across the street. It would have cleared a small lorry - not sure about a large one...

And lastly for this entry this is from the same visit to Mahon and done from the ship's rail once we were back onboard. Mahon is one of those wonderful places where you step off the ship and are immediately in the town. A long curving road leads up the hill to the town centre, but a wide series of steps gives the walker a more direct if no less taxing route. The table umbrellas of a refreshments stall are seen at the bottom.

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Villefranche, an Unexpected Port of Call

Thursday 23 May 2013. Due to bad weather further west we have swapped a day in St Raphael for a day in Villefranche.

David's longed for moment comes when we have to take the tender boats into the town. "Liberty guys to glamorize!" Hmmm... yes, he's been quoting this bit of Americanese all week. Apparently the Americans call tender boats Liberty boats and when David was in the navy and his ship was stationed in America anyone going ashore on the American naval vessel moored alongside was warned departure was imminent by this phrase over their tannoy. Stick fingers in throat to be sick... We are six days into the cruise and it has been uttered so many times that it is now greeted with groans...

Bienvenue a France! Villefranche presents a wonderful face to tourists approaching by boat. The brightly coloured buildings and an old fortress out of shot to the left make a typical French Riviera dream come true.

We moor up on the wharf and clamber up the few steps out of the boat before walking through the port authority buildings and onto French soil. We had waited until all the formal excursions had gone and our boat wasn't crowded at all. Even so it's still only mid morning and we have plenty of time to explore.

Called the Hidden Street, this enclosed street always reminds me somehow of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. All the doors and windows are very heavily barred and old lanterns, but with modern electric bulbs, cast a suitably gloomy light so that you can easily imagine eyes peeping out to see if it's safe! It runs parallel to the sea front but isn't apparent from looking up the streets off the sea front.

We come out onto a path with a view over the lowest buildings onto the bay. To our left the path leads to the railway station. By looking right we are looking out of the bay towards the Mediterranean. Fran takes a last glance before we move on and there's a grunt of surprise from David, who has looked up to see someone working on the roof of a house abseiling down towards his head! The grunt, of course, is swiftly followed by the click of his camera...

Here we are at the far end of the bay looking directly out to sea where the Thomson Dream is moored. Another ship is coming in and turns to moor up in front of our ship. Time for "quatre cafes - un petit peu de cafe et beaucoup de lait"...

And whilst we are in the cafe and the coffee is cooling, the sketchpad comes out for a quick doodle of the seafront. I don't finish it yet so we'll have a look later...

The coffee having run out we set off back down the sea front, with the tables from cafe bars across the street lined up with colourful yellow awnings. A drunken boatman lurches onto the dockside and shouts angrily at his dog, scaring the life out of a poor woman who was sitting on the edge of the sea wall close to his boat.

A bit of time goes by. Wine time! We take a seat in another cafe bar. Unfortunately the waiter who serves us is not as nimble as he might be and he drops a dish of olives all over Fran, insisting on a remedy that involves emptying a salt pot all over her and bringing her a dish of hot water to dab on her top... Miss Franny retains her cool and just merely smacks him around a bit before deciding she is not splashing herself with hot water except for that which is necessary to remove all the salt that he's chucked over her.

Once decorum and wine has been established, I finish off the drawing I started earlier in the other cafe. A woman on the next table is admiring it.
"It was nearly finished when I bought it..." I say, which makes her laugh. Her husband smiles politely and her mother chokes on a prawn and has to be banged on the back. Miss Franny throws salt over her just in case... Oh alright... I made that bit up...

The ladies want to look round the shops and market so David and I wander off to see what mischief we can get up to. A lady in a gorgeous Spanish flamenco dress walks past - I only had time for a rear view, but apparently she was seen later by the ladies, dancing in one of the narrow streets as a street entertainer.

"Would you take our photo please?" comes a musical voice and I turn to see three young and very pretty American girls. They have come in on the other cruise ship which came in as we had our coffee. They were from Washington DC and were happily ignoring the advice of many of their friends who had apparently seen some Liam Neeson film called Taken about an American girl kidnapped by us devious and despicable Europeans.

We go for a look at the fortress and meet up with some fellow passengers from the Thomson Dream - seen here resting in the bay. We oblige them by taking their photo - hang on, we're turning into walkie-snaps here! Then we head down the hill from the fortress to walk alongside the fortress wall.

As we pass, the tender boats from the girls' ship, which we saw earlier, are now sharing space on the dock with ours. Passengers are making their way up the fairly steep hill towards the excursion coaches. The crystal clear water gurgles over the rocks at the foot of the path and it's a very pleasant walk before we realise that we've been quite a while and the ladies are probably wondering where we are. (They weren't - they were too busy looking at fridge magnets...)

We head back and find them loaded down with bags of thimbles, spoons with ceramic souvenir heads, fridge magnets and the odd snow globe. Then we head back to the tender boats for our trip back to the Thomson Dream.

A good time was had by all! "Liberty guys to glamorize...!" Yes, yes, yes David...

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