Tram painting

I did say in my last post that I reckoned that I had a good 10 hours of work to put in to finish the London tram painting. Here's where I was at that stage: -

Here's the photos which show the progress I've made in the last fortnight: -

I'd estimate that I've had my ten hours and I'm not that close to a finish yet. What the hell, I'm really enjoying it. I go through stages in terms of my feelings about the painting I'm making while I'm making it. I start off with optimism then start thinking it's rubbish, then start falling in love with it as glimpses emerge of what the finished painting will be. That's the stage I'm at for the moment. Of course, after I finish I get all critical again, but that's just the way that it goes. I'm really pleased with the front end of the tram at the moment. How much I'm going to work the painting now I don't really know, but I know that at a minimum I have to do the shop fronts immediately behind the tram, and then I need to do the extreme right hand side of the painting. Watch this space.

What have I been doing, then?

Well, not a lot of acrylic painting, to be honest with you. In fact the only reason why I've shaken myself up to post on this, my original art blog - the mother ship, if you like, is because I've started only my first acrylic for a few months. We'll come to that. So what's been going on, then?

1) My Spanish expedition. This took up three weeks of August, and I made tons of ink sketches, and ink and wash sketches. You can see all of these over on my sister blogs "An English Fool Abroad with his sketchbook" and "South Wales Urban Sketcher"

2) My commitment to make at least one sketch in whatever medium every day for a whole year. I began on 26th March, and have so far kept it up every day, having reached just over the 200 day mark.

3) Inktober 2018. The commitment is to produce an ink sketch every day for the month of October, following a prompt.

4) The last of my children to move out has found herself a flat. I've coveted what was her bedroom for several years, and it's now become my studio. I've put up some of my bits and pieces on the wall, and it's a nice place to paint and draw now.

5) I've been working on an acrylic again. With the Artist's group starting up again, I spent the first couple of Wednesdays just working on sketches, but felt that I wanted to be working on a proper painting. So it's back to my lovely old trams. My current painting is an old London tram in the 1950s in South London, right at the end of the first generation tram era. Here it is.

It's a shame that I didn't take photographs in its earlier stages, since the sky was truly horrendous this time a week ago, and I'm quite pleased with the way I've 'rescued' it. As for today, well, on the original sketched design the figures on the left were too small in proportion to the building, but I corrected it when I started painting them in today. I'd make a rough estimate that there's at least 10 hours of work left in it.

Sorry it's been a while:-

- and I would hate you to think that I've given up painting and sketching. I most definitely haven't! For most of August I've been away - almost three weeks in Spain and then this last weekend I spent in Worthing visiting my parents. Much of that time I've been Urban Sketching, and then prior to that I was working with watercolour. Here's a selection of the bits and pieces I've been doing for the last few weeks: -

To date the last watercolour movie icon I painted. Big John was never an actor I really liked - he was the property of my Dad's generation as far as I was concerned - however, you can't argue with box office.

Direct watercolour painted in mighty Kidwelly castle. It was in Kidwelly that I made my first ever ink and wash sketch in 2017. I'd like to think that this is considerably better - oh, who am I kidding - it IS considerably better - mind you, that's not difficult. 

This was another monochrome blue experiment, and I have to say that I was pretty pleased. I made it in an evening at the Artists' group in our last meeting before September.

Then , as I said, I was in Spain. Here's a selection of some of the urban sketches I made in that time:-

In the last week of July I joined a Facebook group called Sketching Every Day. I thought that the daily prompts would help give me ideas for my challenge to make at leas one sketch every day. For more about this challenge you might like to visit my sister blog called South Wales Urban Sketcher - the link is in my links section on the right. I've made a number of ink sketches and watercolours for the site, and here's a few examples:-

Bringing everything bang up to date - I realised this morning that I haven't touched acrylics since my last train painting, and so I resolved to use acrylics for whatever prompt we had this morning. This is the response:-

The Fortune Teller

What I'm pleased about is the depth and richness of colour. Also, it's a wee bit looser than I've managed with acrylic before, which probably accounts for it only taking about 90 minutes from starting to make the sketch on the canvas. Speaking of which, here's a photograph of the sketch: - 

What  I tried to do with the sketch is keep it simple, and not overdo the detail.

The Power of Painting?

Okay, I've been an England football fan for long enough that I can't bear to watch them because they deliberately lose when I do. So, last Tuesday, when England were playing against Colombia in the last 16 of the World Cup, instead of watching I painted this picture: -

I had just enough time after finishing it to watch England win the penalty shoot out  - and that's a rare sentence to write without including the words - 'fail to'.

Fast forward to today, then and England were playing Sweden in the quarter final. I decided to see if I could work the same magic again, and this time painted another film icon, in Marilyn Monroe.

Well, blow me if it didn't work!

So the big decision then is - who do I need to paint on Wednesday in order to get England into the final?

30x30 Direct Watercolour 2018 - Challenge complete

Yes, dearly beloved, yesterday I painted number 30 to complete the 30x30direct watercolor challenge. Here they all are, in no particular order : -

In fact, I enjoyed the challenge so much that I have kept painting watercolours in June - today I added this - number 31