David Clark Art - contact me at londinius@yahoo.co.uk: A Watercolour

I had a hankering to paint another tram. Not a Mumbles tram this time – number 30 from the challenge hasn’t sold yet, although there is some interest in it. I’ve had a surprising amount of success with Glasgow trams. The only previous painting I’ve made of a Glasgow tram which hasn't sold is ironically one of the best paintings of the lot of them. Maybe this is because it’s a fairly large acrylic painting. Still I have sold a few prints of the picture, so I can’t complain. Here it is:-

I did try to take photos of it throughout the process. I did get caught up in the painting though, and so the stretches between photos being taken are pretty uneven.

So there you are – stage 1 – tape the blank piece of paper to the board to prevent the wet paper from getting all out of shape. This is Daler Rowney cold pressed 300 gsm watercolour paper.

If you saw my posts about the 30^th direct watercolour of the 2022 batch you might remember that I painted in part of the skeleton of the tram and the line of the mountains behind so that I could paint in the sky. I did something similar here with the buildings’ rooflines replacing the mountains from the other picture. Perversely I’ve started painting in the right hand side of the paper. I say perversely because when I’m painting in acrylic I try to force myself to work from left to right to avoid smudging wet paint with my right hand accidentally touching the canvas. Watercolour does dry a lot more quickly though.

You can see here what I mean about painting in the right hand side of the painting. I've started on the cars and the figure on the right here. It wasn’t my intention to go extremely detailed on either, bearing in mind that the focus of the picture is the tram. Like the Mumbles trams I’ve painted Glasgow trams on several occasions, but I often find the a little harder than their Mumbles counterparts. It took a long time to develop the tram in this painting, and it probably didn’t help that it’s smaller in the picture than either of the Mumbles tram pictures.

The next stage of painting this was to work on developing the tram. As I said, I didn’t find this extremely easy to do, but as often when you paint a tram, it really does start to appear on the paper when you being to paint in the windows. I also wanted to convey the general dirtiness of the tram, because this tram was a workhorse. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to Glasgow a couple of times and I think it’s a fabulous place, and very beautiful now. However, like any large and industrial UK city in the forties and fifties it was smoky and it was grimy. Look at photos from the time, and you’ll see for yourself.

Having painted most of the detail on the right and in the centre of the painting I put down a wash for the road surface and began to build up the block on the left. I also liked that this painting has a bus going in the opposite direction. It’s in the same Glasgow transport livery as the tram, but in many ways this is the enemy. Tram networks were ripped up throughout the UK at the end of the fifties and the start of the sixties to the great benefit of motor buses. Ecologically trams are much better than buses we now know, especially second generation tramways like those in 7 UK cities now.

It doesn’t necessarily look like it here, but by this time a lot of the hardwork on the left is done. The bus and the two parked vehicles have been painted, as has the line of the kerb which makes it relatively simple to paint in the building. The bus needs a little shading and tone work, but this is minimal.

This is the last of my process photographs, taken immediately after I placed my name in the bottom left had corner. It’s still on the board, but to all intents and purposes it’s done. All in all it took a little more than four hours to paint. It’s a direct watercolour. I painted it straight onto the paper not because I am trying to extend the challenge. But after the last month it just seemed the natural thing to do. So here’s the finished, dry painting.

It's okay. I don’t think it’s quite as good as the Mumbles trams, but then they are very different subjects from a Glasgow Tram. I do think it’s worth compering with a couple of previous watercolours of Glasgow trams, made with either ink and watercolour, or just watercolour.