Some You Lose

Look, I can’t say that I didn’t know what I was potentially getting myself into. We had a craft fair in my school a week ago on Tuesday. At £10 a stall, it was a pretty low risk investment considering that I had pretty much all of the stock I needed, nd two sales would put me into profit. In all honesty it wasn’t a great event. It was poorly attended, but even so, the sales made on the evening made a small profit, and a couple of sales made in the days afterwards when people who’d seen the stall decided they wished they’d bought on the evening made it slightly larger. Well and good.

Now, while I was there, one of the other stall holders approached me telling me about a local craft fair which took place yesterday. I won’t lie, I fancied it. It certainly held out the potential to reach a new audience and make the kind of profit I made with the first craft fair we held in the school before Covid.

The venue is in the neighbouring town of Neath. So, bearing this in mind I made a few sketches of local landmarks, and made prints and postcards of each. So it was already more expensive than the school’s one. Then there was the hassle of making sure that my public liability insurance is up to scratch. The stall itself was twice the cost of the school’s. What’s more, we were expected to provide our own tables, while the school had provided their own. Bearing in mind the possibility of doing future events, I bought one.

My daughter Jess and I arrived about an hour and a half before the doors opened, and I have to say it looked good. There were far more sellers there than any other event I’ve done. They all looked professional. What’s more, there were no other painter-printmakers there. I won’t lie, I was quite excited about the prospects for the day.

Now, if I’d had the kind of day I had for my very first craft fair in 2019, I’d easily have covered all of these costs and had a little profit on top. Well, I wasn’t even close. A combination of factors, not the least of which must have been the horrible drizzly weather, kept people at home. Or at least, it kept them away from the Craft Fair. The photos show how empty the place was at 1:30 pm, when it should have been heaving. This is not the first craft fair held in the venue, and most of the other sellers I spoke to said it was much better attended on every other occasion. It wasn’t that it wasn’t advertised either. The first hour pretty much told the story of the day. There were people walking round, but they weren't really looking at the stalls. This was because for the most part they were other stallholders. It wasn't a case of people looking at the stall and not liking what they saw. Hardly anyone looked at the stall all day. 

If these photos of the 'rush' during the craft fair yesterday had a soundtrack, it would be the sound of tumbleweeds blowing down Main Street. 

Look, I’ve only done a few of these things, but even I know that when you do one you’re taking a gamble. On this occasion I lost. I sold . .  . wait for it . . . nothing at all! Before you start feeling too sorry for me, I think I should say that the only unrecoverable loss is the cost of the stall. I’ll use the table and the insurance for other events. The stock I produced won’t go to waste and can be sold on Etsy or used in another event. I felt worse, if anything, for the lady directly behind us who was selling cakes. As we were packing up she told me that she’s maybe just about made enough to cover her ingredients. She estimated she’d put in about 36 hours preparing for the event – all for essentially nothing. That’s soul destroying.

One little irritation – and I warn you that this does not reflect well upon me, but I’m going to mention this anyway – was this. The event was supporting an appeal for a local girl to have treatment, and that’s admirable, thoroughly admirable. However, the lack of people coming into the fair meant that the people manning the buckets looking for donations really had nobody else to ask for donations, other than the stallholders. Fair play to the organiser, she came up with the idea to have her hair shaved off in order to raise a little more for the cause. She came round asking for donations – and this was about 3 hours into the fair. She wasn’t the first to come to the stall either. I tried to be as nice as I could, but my bottom line was – come back when . . . if . . . I sell anything, you’ve already had £20 off me. Yeah, I tried to say it as politely as possible, but at the end of the day a no is a no, and there’s only so much you can sugar coat it.

So the trilogy becomes a tetralogy

I was congratulating myself yesterday on the Routemaster picture, telling myself that the trilogy of bus pictures was complete. Well, yes, that’s not wrong as such. However it did suddenly strike me that if you’re telling the story of transport on the Uxbridge Road in Ealing in pictures. .  . well, where’s the tram?

I have drawn a tram in Hanwell in charcoal before:-

I've even made an ink sketch of a tram in Ealing Broadway too:-

But it’s not a painting, is it? Well, it’s the school holidays. Time was not an issue today.

Step 1 – gather the materials. In this case, little more than the traditional watercolour paper, HB pencil, sharpener and rubber. Actually I did fetch a 12 inch ruler as well, which you’ll see the effect of in a little while. See if you can guess where I started.

Well, actually it was with the horse drawn wagon on the far right. However, as the drawing developed I would need to erase the cart and start it again. Let’s not mess about here. I’m a tram man, and so I wasn’t going to resist drawing the tram – or the front tram I should say – for very long. As it is, the tram is the star of the picture anyway, and a useful reference for the other aspects.

Can you see how I’ve redrawn the horse and cart on the far right? Repositioned it works much better where it is now. By this time I’ve started working on the background, and it’s the building behind that I needed the ruler for. Not being funny, simply drawing this building took ages. The reference photo is from the first decade of the 20^th century, but the building is still there, and is now a Wenzel's Bakery, I think.

Once I completed the sketch of the building then it was relatively quick and easy to draw the rest of the background. As a drawing it’s a lot less detailed than it would have been had I decided to make it a monochrome ink sketch. Yet as it is, it still took ages to complete the sketch – maybe two hours, maybe a little bit more. I didn’t have a stopwatch on. It’s funny the way your mind can drift off when you’re drawing. It struck me that I would love to be able to tell people how to draw. . . but I just can’t. I can’t remember not being able to draw, and I’ve always been drawing things I can see. It started with cartoon and comic characters, then I moved into superheroes, then I was copying photographs of steam locomotives , and I suppose this was in a way like a course of self-study. But I never had a ‘lightbulb’ moment when it suddenly all clicked. It’s just something I do, and I’m not sure I could tell you how.

 

When I’m going to make a watercolour I get really excited by this stage. I’ve just taped the paper down. The paper is 300 gsm, so it’s fairly sturdy, but the tape helps prevent the cockling that can happen even with good quality watercolour paper like this. I’m going to start with the sky – blue of course – and the road surface. As it is the photo was obviously taken on a sunny day, anyway. But what will I do after that?

Well, if you said – the tram of course – it is true that I normally lack the discipline to stop myself going straight for my favourite bit, which is nearly always the vehicle. But just for variety today I went for that building. I had an inkling it was going to be quite complex. I couldn’t stop myself from jumping around a little though. At the same time I also began working on the horse’s cart, the tree and a couple of the figures as well.

I added definition to the figures and continued work on the cart. I tried to darken the front and the right hand side of the building as well. Being a right hander it’s not a good idea to do what I did with this picture and work extensively on the right hand side of the painting first – if you’re a little clumsy like I have been known to be from time to time you can inadvertently smudge paint without even realising it until it’s too late to do really effective remedial work.

In the same way that a bus or another vehicle never really looks right until you’ve started painting in the interior through the windows, it was true for the main building in this picture. With detailing on the windows it started to look a lot better, and with some shading. The lettering on the canopy was done with a green ink pen. Fosters had moved from Ealing Broadway but I remember them having a shop in West Ealing when I was growing up, and I think the lettering was green. If it wasn’t – hey, that’s what the term artistic license was invented for. The right hand side of the painting wasn’t looking bad by this stage.

In comparison with my three previous Ealing pictures the tram occupies a lot less of the page than the buses do. Also it’s a London United tramways tram, and their livery was mainly blue and white rather than red. I saw one in the flesh, if you like, two years ago when I visited the National Tramways museum at Crich in Derbyshire, although sadly I didn’t get to ride it since it wasn’t one of the ones on duty that particular day. To try to get a feeling for what the completed painting might look like I painted in the dark building to the left. This is the Ealing Hippodrome, a music hall/theatre which soon became a cinema, and last until the Fifties, I think. The building was demolished and a rather nondescript W.H.Smiths built in its place. The Smiths did have a shallow circular ramp into the basement record department, which was where the stage machinery had been housed.

Just after I took this photo the message flashed up on my PC, which had my reference photo on it, that the battery was running very low. So I stopped for a break to charge it up.

Once I came back, then, it was a matter of painting in the second tram and detailing the buildings behind it. I was actually quite surprised just how quickly I was able to finish off the majority of the right hand side of the picture. The further away from the foreground you get, the more you can do with just suggestion, I suppose.

So there we are, signed and ready for me to remove the tape. I do rather like this, even though I don’t expect it can speak to Ealing inhabitants of a certain age in the way that the trolleybus and routemaster pictures do.

My great, great grandfather and my great grandfather were the first members of my family to more to Ealing. When I was doing my family history research I found that they moved to Grosvenor Road in about 1907, and so this is what I think that Ealing Broadway would have looked like when they moved here. So here’s the finished painting.

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.

Craft Fairs: Take two

It was only three years ago that I did my first Craft Fair, although this was before Covid, so it seems like a lifetime ago. The craft fair was at the school where I teach. I used my ink sketches to make some prints, some postcards and some calendars, large and small. Considering I was winging it I made a very nice bit of profit after all the costs were taken into consideration. This was just consolidated when the local church held a craft fair a week later, and since I could sell leftover stock, once I’d paid for the stall it was practically all profit, even though I didn’t sell as much.

Then covid happened.

I was offered he chance to take a stall in a craft fair in the same church in June. Bearing in mind the small number of sales I made the previous time I decided to pass. Last Tuesday, though, the school held another Craft Fair. It’s the wrong time of year to try flogging calendars, I reasoned, but I have a huge number of original watercolours to sell, and ran off some more prints and postcards.

I have to be honest, it wasn’t great. There were very few people there, I’m afraid. For most of the evening it looked as if I wasn’t going to cover my costs. Then I sold an original sketch, and a print, which covered the costs, and a colour print, an embroidered bag and a couple of postcards which made a small profit. The profit became a bit larger when a colleague asked me if I’d sold one of the acrylic paintings I had with me on the night, and bought it off me the next day.

Still, one of the things you can find when you do a craft fair is that you can pick up some useful contacts. I was approached by a lady who is running a Craft Fair in Neath next Saturday. The only thing is. . ., well most of the prints and sketches I’ve sold in craft fairs have been of local locations in Port Talbot. I haven’t made many sketches of Neath locations at all. So I held back a little and set myself the target of making four or five sketches of Neath locations in the weekend. If I could do it then happy days and I’d book a stall. If I couldn’t, then I’d save myself £20.

Well, I did book the stall, so obviously I made the sketches. Here they are – sorry that I’ve put the word sample on them. 

A fortnight ago I have a very unpleasant exchange when I posted a painting of an Ealing trolleybus on an Ealing group. One of the people who commented said that he’d bought a frame for it. Which left me a bit puzzled. Was this an offer to buy? A request for a print? I asked him for clarification, and reminded him that the image is copyright, and I had made it clear when I posted it that I do not give permission for anyone to print the image off.

Ho boy.

Can open. Worms all over the floor.

Facebook groups are quite clear. You’re not to post to advertise your work. Fair enough. I don’t even respond publicly when someone posts requesting a print, or to buy the original. I may well respond with a private message, but that’s as far as I would go. But simply reminding people that the copyright on my painting is mine brought a storm of abuse from this numpty. So there you go.

Now, I will have to print off some prints and postcards, so I am gambling that I will at least cover my costs. Nothing ventured nothing gained, though. I’ll let you know how we go.

Trying out the new paintbox: Type B London Bus

Another week, another bus. Except this wasn’t just any ordinary week. 6 years ago now I bought a Winsor and Newton watercolour set. I found it on special offer, and couldn’t believe my luck. Well, that was 6 years ago, since when I’ve completed the 30x30 watercolour challenge four times by my reckoning and that’s not counting all of the other watercolour paintings I’ve made with it. The thing is though all of my favourite colours, and all of the colours I use most in it are pretty much gone. So I did some research, and I’m giving a different make a try. This painting I’m going to show you my process photos of is the first I’ve made with it. I did make an ink sketch of it last year, like the trolleybus picture:- here's the ink sketch: - 

So, here is the first of the process photos that I took. I started yesterday on Friday evening.

So, as with the trolleybus I painted last weekend, I knew I was going to sketch the basic design first. Like that picture, this one is based on a black and white postcard. It was one of a series you could get from Ealing Libraries back in the 1970s. I started with the bus. It’s not, I’m sure, technically the ‘right’ way to do it. But I can’t help it. Primarily I paint for fun, and while I’ve tried doing things the way that books and tutorials say, I just can’t. I always revert to my own ways, wrong though they may be. As it is I got the bus proportions right pretty much first time, although I did make the passenger on the top right smaller while I was painting.

So here you see the whole piece of paper. It’s A4 again, and the bus is slightly right of centre. The next stage was to outline the buildings to the right of the bus. Like last weekend’s painting, this is the London Borough of Ealing, in the East of the borough in Acton High Street. Acton was where my dad grew up, although he was born in Battersea, and he grew up in Acton a few decades after the original photograph was taken.

So the basic outline of the buildings is begun here. I also sketched in the figures since I found them to be useful reference points for the building.

And there we are. This is as much detail as I wanted to do on the original sketch. It’s plenty to give me what I need to get the proportions right when I come to paint it. If anything it’s a little more detailed than I planned, but the back of the bus, and those adverts on it kind of necessitated it.

So it was taped to the board, and since there was plenty of daylight left on Friday evening I felt I could and should make headway before I left it for the night.

First job, as usual, was to paint in the sky. I would have given it a blue sky anyway, but even on a black and white photo I felt you could see that this was taken on a sunny day all those years ago. I also began to paint in the bus. My first thought was that the red was a little too crimson for my liking, but you know my thoughts – don’t pass judgement until the bus is complete with its interior painted in. I made a mistake not painting in the first layer of the roadway, but I rectified this by the next photo.

By the time I took this photo you can see that I had started painting the interior, seen from the rear. You can also see that I’s started painting in the adverts. The dark blue background to the letters was a bit of a no brainer. Apart from the fact that I have seen enamel signs from the time in this colour scheme, the blue makes such a contrast with the red of the bus. If you look to the left of the picture you can also see there’s a tram. In the photo I can’t be certain, but it does look like a London United Tramways tram, and dark blue and white was the colour scheme of these beauties.

The green oval sign on the back of the bus is actually an advert for Heinz, but I juet couldn’t do the lettering, It’s just too small. I had also made a good start on the underside of the bus, the wheels and tyres. I mentioned last week about my inability to focus on one aspect of a painting for very long. Well, you can see where my attention wandered in this photo in the way that I suddenly decided to paint in the passengers’ hats on top.

This is the photo I took when I finished up working on the painting on Friday evening and it gives you a good idea of how the light was going. I was about ready to finish anyway. I’d pretty much finish the bus. I’d painted in the top deck passengers, the red destinations on the boards, the brass rails and the advert on the side of the bus. I’d also made a start on the buildings. Not bad for one evening’s work.

So, a fresh start on Saturday morning. The first job was to apply the first creamy, sandy layer of colour to the main building.

It’s in this photo that I first really started to get an idea of what the finished painting was going to look like. The obvious thing is the dark brickwork on top of the first layer of paint on the building. However there’s also the green ornamental lamppost as well. I have it in my head that these posts might well have been green back in the day. However, even if they weren’t, it kind of looks okay.

Now the window and door frames have been applied and I am starting to be very pleased with the building. I think the dark green ornamental lamp which has just been added looks a treat. Putting in some of the windows helped as well

This photo shows where I used guesswork on the far right of the building, since this extends further than the cut off point for the photograph. I also painted in a little dark area on the roof just above and slightly to the right of the bus.

Can you see what I worked on between the previous photo and this one? It’s over on the far left. I added some shading to the wooden frame that the bloke with the cap is putting up, I also painted in part of a shadowy figure walking away from the camera on the extreme left. A few more details like the chimney on top of the white building on the left pretty much took care of that part of the painting. I also painted in the faces of the figures.

So this is the last process photo and by the time I took this the painting was more or less complete. I decided that the figures would have to be in brown, dark blue, greens and greys and I’m pretty happy with the way they worked out.

Type B Bus in Acton High Street

So this is the finished painting. I’m not sure that it’s as good as the trolleybus, but then it’s a rather more complicated subject for all that. As a first go with the new paint set I’m really rather pleased. I do think that with hindsight, if I was doing another London bus with it I would mix in some orange with the red to take it more towards the pillar box red which I wanted.