London Trolleybus in Ealing process and finished painting

Good morning dearly beloved. I did do a couple of prompts on Sketching Every Day during the week, which I haven't posted here. But during the week I saw a lovely video on Facebook posted by the London Trolleybus Preservation Society of one of their restored trolleybuses. Now, I'm a tram man, yes, but that doesn't mean I don't like trolleybuses, especially London ones. 

Last year, I think, I made this ink sketch based on a black and white photograph.

I was pretty pleased with it at the time. Come to think of it, I still think it's a nice sketch. Still, the painting itch was strong in me on Saturday, and so in the morning I decided I would use the black and white photo as the basis for a watercolour painting. I originally made this post before I'd finished the painting. Since then I've added the  more process photos and the final finished painting.

Yes, I did draw the design in pencil first. There is a reason. My way of thinking was - look, my direct watercolours greatly improved in June. Will this improvement manifest itself in my watercolours where I have sketched them on the paper first? Now, as you can see when you see the next sketch, this is nothing like as detailed as the pen sketch. It still took ages though.

Okay, ready to start painting by now. As I said, the sketch was a lot less detailed than I used to do even as the basis of a painting. Even the trolleybus, which looks quite detailed compared with the buildings in the centre isn't actually as detailed as I would previously have made it. Ready now to be taped down to the board.

Right, so, Ealing, where this is set, is my home borough, and I want it looking its best. Also I felt that blue sky would contrast better with the red trolleybus. This is not the best blue sky I have ever painted, and could have been an inauspicious start. The tower just left of the centre of the picture is the town hall. You can see the road markings, and if you look really closely you can see that they were meant to be made slightly to the right of where they are. Oops. 

No standing on ceremony today. Straight on with the bus once the sky and the road surface had had their first layer applied. Remember what I've said before - this is where you have to have patience and faith. It may not look much now - it certainly doesn't - but there was plenty of time for it to come good.

At this point I took a break and went for a walk for an hour and a half, during which I saw 6 different species of butterfly, which put me in a great mood. 

Back to the painting then. The trolleybus is already looking better here now I've worked on shading and shadows. In order to have enough precision to be able to make legible writing on the destination board I did use a very thin fineliner.  Although you may notice that my wandering attention span has led me at this stage to leave the unfinished bus for now to paint in one of the cars alongside it, and also the tree in the background. 

I've said before that the time you start to get a feel for what a painted bus, tram or railway carriage will look like when it's finished is when you've painted the interior, or at least what you can see of it through the windows and the windscreen. I think you can see what I mean if you compare this photo with the previous one, and I really wasn't at all unhappy by this stage. 

So this is as far as I got on the Saturday, and I was really starting to get a feeling for what the finished painting would be like. The trolleybus is virtually finished. I haven't quite finished all of the cars in the background, but there's really just detailing left. The biggest job left is the buildings directly to the left of the bus, and the wall beneath the tree on the extreme right. There's orange brown brickwork and window details to apply to the buildings, then the very dark shopfronts below which should provide interest and a contrast to the lightness of the town hall. I stopped for the day after this one. All of the following pictures were taken on the Sunday.

I began work on the shops just to the left of the trolleybus. I'm from Ealing so I had a pretty good idea of what colour I wanted for the brickwork, but I will admit that I did google for some colour photos of the buildings just to be on the safe side. Curiously, the more detail that I paint in next to the bus, the better it looks itself.

Just a little bit of work to suggest the windows on the shops gave me just what I was looking for here. You can also see that I've started to paint in some of the details of the shop fronts. The idea was to go with a brown base, suggesting the wooden frames of doorways and windows, and paynes grey for the darkest areas. I also decided not to edit out the figures in the reference photograph, but so I sketched in very rough outlines  to paint around. If you look on the far left, I've added detail to the rear end of the trolleybus going the other way, and the trees.

Not far off done now. I've completed all the detailing on the buildings, and painted in the shop fronts and the suggestion of figures by the shops. The only large area which isn't quite finished is the wall to the extreme right which you can also see through the windscreen of the trolleybus. 

This is the last process photo that I took before taking the tape off the finished painting. The wall is done, and I've painted in the kerbs and the shadow of the trolleybus on the pavement. It looks pretty much complete at this stage. Can you see the small finishing touches I needed to add before removing the tape?

This is the finished painting. I've added the tramlines rather than leaving them in pencil - they're ink, in case you were wondering. I also used a watercolour pencil to give a very light blue tinge to some of the windscreen frames on the front of the bus, just to pull them back a little.I also added a little yellow around the London Transport roundel on the front of the bus. That's it. I know I shouldn't say it, but I'm really pleased with this painting, because it's pretty much turned out the way I wanted it to. You can't ask a huge amount more than that. 

Acrylic Project: Tram

 It's been a good week, First of all I sold my acrylic painting of the London Tram on Highgate Hill: - 

London Tram on Highgate Hill

I like this 20x16 painting a lot, but I've had two years of pleasure from it now, and so it just felt like time to let it go. Then, a couple of days later, I also sold this painting of a vintage Lisbon tram, based on one of my friends' holiday snaps.

Vintage Lisbon Tram

Again, it's a painting I'm pretty find of. I painted it while I was off work with depression in 2017 and I've had a hankering to visit Lisbon ever since. Still, it's quite a while since I painted anything in acrylic, and even then it was a copy of Frank Brangwyn's painting of a market in Tunisia. So I reckoned that if I sold a couple then I'd have a couple of display spaces on my wall that need filling, which would act as a spur to get me working again. Well, that and I'd have a few quid into the bargain. 

There's no prizes for guessing that I was going to make another tram painting. I love trams, and I've sold over 15 paintings or drawings I've made of trams over the last 5 years. Being as yesterday was Saturday and not a school day I panned a start by going to the post office at 9 am to post the Lisbon painting. That changed when my wife, daughter and grandson needed a lift to Neath, and I didn't get back from posting the painting until some time after 10. I couldn't rouse myself to get going until after 12.

Normally I'd sketch out as much of a design as possible before applying paint to canvas. I made a conscious decision to do this one differently. I sketched the outline of the tram to the size I wanted, then applied the detail in the tram, and then just the barest details of the background - the edge of the building to the left of the picture, the figure by the pavement edge and the car to the right, and the treeline. 

I'm not as quick as I once was, but I doubt I was more than about 20 minutes sketching. I was experiencing that wonderful frisson you get when you're about to start applying acrylic to a canvas. The obvious choice was to paint in the sky first. It's not perfect - I like the streaky clouds, but I plan to do a little more work next session to soften it and also to tone down the brightness a little. 

Most of the session was spent working on the tram itself. The big idea was to get the main body done, that's the window framework, the green panels and the orange panels. I also started work on the underside. It would probably have been more sensible and more disciplined to have painted in the trees to the right before I actually started on tram or car, but hey, I'm not a professional artist and I don't claim to paint in a traditional (or sensible) way. So I painted the car, and only then moved onto the trees. Using combinations of three hues of green and one blue and a touch of grey, I'm really rather pleased with the way that the trees turned out. I painted in the figure with one colour, but I'm going to apply detail to him in the next session. Finally, I finished by applying a watery wash of blue grey to the ground. I stopped where I did because I want the ground in front of the tram to have a farm more yellowy tinge.

I took this o my phone when I'd finished applying paint for the session. I can see that the sky, particularly in the centre of it, needs some remedial work, and I want to soften the blue a bit. The ground needs some detail applying to it, but there' still tramlines and shadow to be added, so hopefully the car and the tram won't continue to look as if they are floating on top of it. The front of the tram is too orange and will also need some work.

I'd been at it for the best part of 3 and a half hours by this point, and didn't want to apply any more paint in this session. Still, rather than finishing at this point, it did strike me that I might well want to start painting the buildings on the right in the next session, so I began to draw in some outlines and guidelines. By the tie I packed up and cleared away for the day I'd been working for a shade over 4 hours in total. 

I have mixed feelings about the painting at this stage. I'm pretty pleased with the composition - I like the position and the size of the tram. But it's at the stage where you have to have faith that it's going to get better as you add details and work on it. I'm finding it difficult to envisage what the ground will look like once the shadows and some cobble details have been added, but I have to have faith that it will work. Everything on the painting is looking pretty bright, but hopefully the dark shop level of the buildings will give a contrast, as will the dark details visible through the windows of the tram. The one grey window I've already painted in just gives a hint about how this may turn out. 

Even when I do make plans I very rarely stick to them. Allowing for that, then, I would like to finish the tram in the next session. I also think it would be a good idea to work on the sky before tackling the upper portions of the building, although I would like to get the shop fronts in. I will also lay down a base colour for the roadway in front of the tram, although finishing off the roadway will probably be one of the last jobs that I'll do, after the building. It's taken about 4 hours to get this far. Going on recent form I reckon there's maybe 10 hours left in this one now