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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Early Crayon and Watercolours

Soul being laid bare again. Today I've put together a collection of my earliest forays into colour sketching and painting. Dating from 1992 to 1994 I had only picked up a pencil again since leaving school a mere 2 years before and standards had not yet reached the dizzying lows that I achieve today. So: stop that sniggering and adopt your most appreciative expressions as we take a look at scribblings from some thirty years ago. Oh blimey... thirty years! I'll carry on after a bit of a sit down...

This view of Portmeirion in Wales started life as a pencil drawing during the early days of my sketching when I used to draw on site (or pleine air as we artist types like to say) but with the main concern being to get it done and stop before anyone came to look over my shoulder and laugh. I needn't have worried too much. The only person who came anywhere near just shouted "I am not a number - I am a free man!" and carried on running, followed by a marching band and a huge bouncing ball. The crayons were added later at home in a secure and safe environment.

An experiment that to-date has never been repeated was this sketch on black paper with pencil crayons of Lytham windmill in Lancashire. It's only small, probably around 5x4 inches (12.5 x 10 cm). Even at home there was a sense of get it done and put it away quick!

First ever watercolour since finishing GCE O Levels (I just managed to fail my art exam...) at school in 1970. Actually the traction engine isn't bad, but the forest that only existed in my head is pretty dire I admit. Perhaps it says something about the state of my mind at the time? Complex is not the word!

This is a view of Coniston Water from the north west corner of the lake at Monk Coniston. Done from one of my own black and white photos it was as much an excercise (ha! experiment!) in handling distant hills and reflections in water as much as anything.

In 1993 we spent a fortnight's holiday in Florida and visited Cape Kennedy Space Centre one day. You don't get a lot of time for sketching on such a visit and I did this once back at home from a postcard we bought. We were quite narked as our flight home was within a couple of days of a Space Shuttle launch, though in the end it was called off because of the weather anyway.

This was the first sort of serious attempt at a watercolour, again from one of my own photographs of a Blackpool tram. I had bought an A4 pad of watercolour paper boards. This now hangs in the hallway of my mate who insists it was because he liked it rather than just to make me feel good. It did anyway.

I think this may have already sneaked into one the UK sketches articles but it belongs here just as much. I was getting ambitious by this time. This is on a massive A3 bit of paper and is another sketch done from one of my own black and white photos, this time of Knaresborough in Yorkshire. A bit scribbly as yet, particularly in the tree department, but it did take me a long time to get to grips with drawing trees which I still do with a sort of slightly more controlled scribble these days. This marked a start at using several colours in the same spot to achieve some form of texture or effect.

This technique was taken to extremes in the eye of this eagle portrait, this time from a detail of someone else's painting (I'm not that daft as to get so close to the real thing...). I spent ages on the eye and feel it did pay off. There are lots of different colours in there!

After moving on somewhat with pencil crayons I fancied trying something a bit more ambitious with watercolours. This was on another of the A4 boards, but suffers a little from sticking to a wholly inappropriate brush that came with a child's watercolour set and putting down large blocks of dark colour instead of building up layers. A bit of laziness is a factor here too in that decision! The dark grey of the smoke at the side of the loco is probably the worst of it, the fields could be better but the area around the station buildings and platform at least made me keep it instead of chucking it in the bin!

This watercolour was done from a sheet of paper from the A5 sketch pad and showed me how badly paper reacts to being soaked! As wet parts expanded and dry parts didn't the surface became anything but flat. Again the difficulty in producing fine work with a stiff flat-ended brush led to a 12 year gap between this and my next attempt at watercolours. By then, though, my drawing techniques were getting better.

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Colour Artworks Nov 2019 - Mar 2020

Winter in Burke Towers usually involves a degree of self-isolation even without any incentive from virus bugs. And whilst I've recently spent a lot of time trying to sort out my music collection, I have on occasion got out paints or crayons of one sort or another to have a dabble at some artwork.

I spent several days coming back to this one, which I finished on 15 November 2019. Clematis Cottage in Selworthy a few miles from Minehead, Somerset. It is a watercolour. Whenever I have paintings framed I use the same framer and he commented that he preferred my watercolours to the oil pastels as they had better detail. From my own point of view, it is much easier to mix colours in watercolour too. But because they are transparent, any mistakes usually have to be lived with as they are next to impossible to cover up!

30 November 2019, I was sitting half hypnotised by photos just flashing on and off on my screensaver one day and a photograph of Bourton-on-the-Water woke me up with the realisation that it might make a good subject for a sketch. I did this over the course of the day - around five to six hours in all. Coloured pencils in the A4 sketch book and it was done without any prior pencil sketching. A first...

This was done on Christmas Eve, again in five to six hours. This time the inspiration was a photo found on the Internet of Lake Halstatt, Austria. I used pastel pencils for this one and once more just got on with it without any pencil work beforehand.

I've had it in mind to attempt this view ever since I took a photo from this viewpoint in Portofino, Italy in September last year. Recently I found a 9x7 inch pad of watercolour paper that had remained untouched since the house move a year ago and did this at my desk, using a desktop easel that marked its own first use. A slightly different technique than my usual dabbing style and whilst it found favour with viewers on FaceBook, I might still try another version either in another medium or with my usual watercolour technique and on larger paper at some point in the future.

That brings us up to just a couple of days ago so until I splash or spread a bit more colour or pencil over a bit of paper, I hope you enjoyed looking at these and bye for now.

Sketching and Artwork Index

1992 Sketches

Continuing the series about my sketching into the year 1992. Includes my first attempts at colour work.

The first two sketches were done on an early break to Wales. Beddgelert is a lovely place with the grave of a faithful hound that was killed by mistake. I hadn't a lot of time to do this so it's a bit lacking in subtlety, but it is what it is.

Likewise with this one of Snowdon in the background with Llanberis Lake. We were on the Llanberis railway which stops off at a little picnic spot. We had had our picnic and there was only a few minutes before the train would pass by again to pick us up.

The jetty at Monk Coniston in the Lake District. It was done from a photograph I took on a visit some ten years previously. First go at adding some colour.

A familiar sight! Home sweet home... This was done from a photo as well. I wasn't yet ready to stand drawing in front of the sort of crowds Blackpool got... This scene has changed a lot since then with a new Promenade which has reclaimed quite a bit of land from the sea and the demolition of the pedestrian bridge over the Promenade roadway.

Another Lake District scene taken from one of my photographs. I was experimenting with a line technique for the sky. It looks quite effective but for some reason I never tried it again. This is on A4 paper so more detail is evident and this shows a close scribbling technique on the trees that I still use.

A few from a weekend staying with good friends who have a cottage in Sedbergh just over the border from Lancashire into Cumbria and not far from the Badlands of the Yorkshire Dales [wink]. It's a lovely area and a lovely town with some wonderful walks. Most of these were knocked off inside half an hour or 20 minutes as I didn't want to hold up the entire party. But they give an impression of the places we visited.

Ok, trees I'm just about coping with. Rocks I need to get to grips with. But now I come up against water!!! Still haven't really mastered this one!

Last one from this weekend - the Quaker Friends Meeting House at Brigflatts.

A very rare watercolour. I can best describe this somewhat unsubtle technique as "plastering on the paint"!

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Colour Artworks

I know, I know... I have been sadly lax in publishing articles here for the last few months. Well lots of other stuff has been getting in the way. We moved house for one. So I'm now no longer a Blackpool resident but am living in a place called Poulton-le-Fylde just a couple of miles away from my old house. Miss Franny and I have spent several months stressing over it all (oh my God that is not over-egging the past few months in any way, shape or form!) But now we are here, 6 or so weeks in and having found (I hope) most of the things that needed fixing in the short term.

So with this belated catch-up entry I'm going back to look at various bits of art (you know... - my doodling!) that has been produced since I last mentioned it. You should have seen a few pencil sketches from holidays - and if not then I hope you're going to do some catching up of your own! Tsk! At one point I showed the old sepia postcard that I was considering doing a painting of. Not that long ago, not even two years - it was on the 11th April 2017 to be precise... Anyway, having never attempted to draw a horse before I cut the number of them down by a half and did this A2 size oil pastel over the ten days following that blog article.

This was also from an old black and white postcard and is another A2 sized oil pastel. I overcame my usual nerves at adding figures and put a workman clipping the hedges on the right. I'm not the best at drawing humans but in this case he was actually an early 20th century robot in blue dungarees (how do you spell that???) so it was alright!

My uncle and aunt bought me an A4 spiral-bound sketchbook for Christmas in 2016 and this was my first sketch in it. For some reason I thought I'd start at the back instead of the front of the book thinking any finished works wouldn't get smudged by flipping the pages over. Totally never thought about how they might get moved as I did more art on pages resting on top of them... duh. This is a street market in Rhodes, Greece and is done with my best set of kids' pencil crayons.

My mate David is not only mad enough to trust me to back up his singing but he watches football. Which is probably why he's a singer and not a musician as I spent all my Saturday afternoons from age 12 learning to play guitar and keyboards. After 50-odd years you'd think I'd have got the hang of it by now... Anyway he asked me to have a bash at the Etihad stadium of his team, Manchester something or other. A3 done in pastel pencils.

I found a photo of this Venice scene on the Internet and it prompted me to try an oil pastel of the Grand Canal at twilight. A2 in size, it's become a sort of favourite and now hangs in my dining room. A bit of a waste as we sit in the living room most nights watching Pointless as we eat our tea...

I was admiring some portraits painted by a friend and said how I'd never dare to have a go. He poo-poohed this and said I should try it so I dug out a photo I took of actress Ingrid Pitt in the late 1990s and set to with a set of oil paints given to me by my son-in-law. So my first portrait and my first real painting done with brushes and paint. I used a grid to get the likeness and there's a good four unsuccessful layers underneath this final layer, which I'm quite chuffed with. A2 size. I'm so sad that I was unable to show it to her as she passed on a few years ago, but she did have a pencil sketch I did of her which she was graciously enthusiastic about at the time.

A bit closer to home, this is the Bridge House at Ambleside in the Lake District. Another night scene and done on A2 paper with pencil crayons. They are watercolour pencils but I couldn't screw up my courage enough to get this wet...

"Phew, I might take up art if I can have someone like this stretching over my settee..." said one of my FaceBook friends. No such luck for me though as this was done from a photo. Another pencil crayon sketch in the A4 sketchbook. If any young damsel would like to be sketched from life, my email address is to the left... (Right, now. Who changed that template???)

Ever looking for new challenges, this is a watercolour. I have another friend on FaceBook (yes two of them, who'd have thought...) who keeps posting scenes of picturesque... er... scenes... So this was done from one of those. The colours, lighting and some content were changed to protect the innocent. A2 on cartridge paper, which stretched and warped a bit from the watercolour. I've taken it to be framed and the chap in the shop was a bit worried. I don't like to be the only one with a challenge, now do I?

This was done in January this year to take my mind off the fact that the people buying our house had pratted about for so long that the house we wanted to buy ourselves had been put back up for sale. We did get it in the end and I'm sitting in it now but we had a few months where life was a sort of pressure cooker existence. This is another scenic scene from the afore mentioned friend on FaceBook and is another part of England's Lake District. Pastel pencils in the A4 sketchbook.

And bringing us up-to-date, this is my first artwork done in the new house. I went back to the sepia Edwardian postcards again for this view of the mill at Guy's Cliffe in Warwickshire. Oil pastels on A2 paper with (thankfully) no humans, horses or any other species waiting for me to mess up the picture by attempting them.

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