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.