Completing my Ealing bus trilogy

Yesterday was the first day of the long summer holidays from school. I don’t have many more of these holidays left if all goes to plan. I always think that it’s a good idea to give yourself a little project to do something constructive on the first day. So I decided to complete a trilogy of watercolour paintings of Ealing buses, which I’ve just finished this morning. If you check out previous posts you'll see that the first two were a trolley bus near Ealing Broadway, and an old B Type bus on Acton High Street.

I’m always a little tense when I look at the blank page which I’m about to start working on, like this. As with the trolleybus and the Type B Bus, I decided to sketch the design first. It’s another fairly complex scene, in fact maybe the most complicated of the three, bearing in mind the amount of other traffic in the picture.

The routemaster bus is the ‘star’ of the picture and so I went with my instincts to draw the bus first. The reference photo I was using is monochrome, and very nice too, but it does have a huge photographers mark covering the face of the bus. This meant that for a long time the side of the front of the bus on the right on the bottom deck was going to remain very sketchy.

I think you can see what I mean when you look at this photo of the completed bus sketch. It took me over an hour to get this far, and I was itching to start painting. However the background at least needed to be sketched in lightly before I was going to do this.

You can see the shops and the other traffic to the far left now, and I’ve also drawn in the first car on the right, really as a bit of a marker. I judge distances by eye normally, and this car gives me a handy reference point for putting in the traffic, for the buildings behind the bus, for the buildings on the right and for the traffic island. You can see these things more clearly in the next photo.

In this one you can probably see what I mean whenever I say that when you start painting you can be forgiven for thinking that it is going to turn out terribly. I haven’t done much more here than finish sketching in the outlines, then painting in the traditional Ealing blue sky, and the purple grey road surface. Then I couldn’t resist it any longer, and began on the bus. One thing I was happy with was that even though I painted this with my new paint box I did manage to get a shade of red that was right, whereas the type B Bus I painted a fortnight or so ago was too crimson for my liking.

So you can see that the bus skeleton has been painted in now, and on the side of the bus I had started to add some deeper shades. Incidentally – to the right of the bus can you see where I inadvertently got some red on the sky by mistake? In the next photo you can see what I did to try to sort that out.

So with a small, wet brush I lifted as much of the red as I could, leaving a pinky blush. I wasn’t finished with it yet, but for now it would do and I wouldn’t need to bother about it until much later. As I did with the trolleybus a few weeks ago, I used ink for the number and for the destination board on the front of the bus. The important thing for me to remember here is that the pens I used for it are water soluble, so a little care would be required. The shadows at the top of the window frames on the side of the bus are paint, though.

Now, what do we usually say? With a bus or tram, don’t judge how well you’ve done until you’ve painted the interior through the windows. Suddenly, it’s a routemaster bus! Well, not actually suddenly. I paused for lunch between this and the previous painting, and during this I googled several photos which showed me what the missing section of the front of the bus should look like. Then I sketched it in, painted it and was happy with the results. You may also notice that I’ve started on the vehicles to the left of the bus. Working with monochrome photos the colours are a matter of guesswork, but I did fancy a very 70s/80s bronze for the car on the immediate left.

A brown roof for the car, and dark brown lettering on the van pretty much finished them off, with shadows under the car, and the kerb. I also painted the vertical blue posts of the rails. It’s not immediately obvious either, but I painted a creamy yellow on the main body of the building on the left. My experience with the Acton painting is that this makes a really good base for putting dark brickwork on top of.

With the brickwork, the window panes, and the shop details painted in the left hand side of the painting was pretty much complete. The passenger on the top left you can see through the window still needed painting in, but the blue rails on the left are there, although they’re so faint you do have to look quite closely. By now, you can see that the bus is tied into the painting, and is part of it, rather than just being this huge red object floating in space.

This is the last photo I took before calling it a day yesterday. I painted in most of the cars to the immediate right of the bus, and was pretty pleased with the way that they turned out. I used a minimum of strokes with the brush. Since the cars are this far in the background, what I was trying to do was just make suggestions, enough to trick the eye into filling the rest. You might also notice another routemaster bus just peeping out from behind the shop on the left. Speaking of that shop, I solved the problem of putting the front of it in light shadow by using a very faint blue. As for the fitted furniture sign, again I used an ink pen – this time a green one. I painted in the curving pavement on the bottom right, and the yellow line on the road. Finally I very lightly painted in the windows of the tower block above and slightly to the right of the traffic.

I will come clean that I did do a little research last night. I was fairly sure that the buildings immediately behind the bus and above the traffic were what I remember as Abernethies and Daniels. But I found some colour photos of both just to make sure that I was remembering the colours correctly – darker brown brickwork for Abernethies, more yellowy brickwork for Daniels. Once I’d completed these buildings I think it was the first time I could get a really clear idea of what the finished painting would look like.

Not a lot remained to do. Detailed work on the shopfronts, and on the figure on the traffic island, and some street furniture on the right. Nor, remember I said I would come back later to the pink splodge? Well, first I darkened some of the windows on the tower block and gave it a little more definition to make it more recognisable. Then I used a little grey quite judiciously to plump the splodge out into a cloud. All that really remained was to sign and date it.

Here it is, the finished painting. I think it’s a nice painting, on a par with the trolleybus, which is pleasing. What I really like though, is that this is how I remember West Ealing. I wasn’t around when type B buses were trundling up and down Acton High Street and I wasn’t around when trolleybuses were gliding towards Ealing Broadway. However I very much was around when scenes like this were happening, and I look at this, and it seems right. Job done.