Daily Sketch: Taibach Library

Taibach Library, Port Talbot

This is a subject I have actually painted in the past. It's a little bit of laziness on my part, since it's only a couple of hundred yards down the road from where I live. Like the church picture this one is done with a fineliner, and I'm pleased with both because they are closer to what I feel an urban sketch should be than anything else I've done.

English country church

English Country Church

If this only looks like part of the painting you're right. This is painted for a special occasion, but that's not important for now. What I really like about this is the trees. I am so pleased with both sets of trees, but especially with the foliage on the left hand side. This is immodest, but I think if you compared these with the trees in last year's painting of the little red corvette, or even the trees in the fairground engine painting there's no comparison. In fact I stopped working on the trees before I originally planned to simply because I was pretty happy, and was afraid that I'd end up overworking them if I carried on.

Daily Sketch: Baglan Church

I've not been happy with what I've done with pen and ink, so I bought a very fine fineliner pen today, and made this very simple and quick sketch of Baglan Church.

This a good step closer to what I'm trying to achieve - it's really starting to look like what I understand an urban sketch to be

Daily Sketches: Man of Steel and Train Station

This is another sculpture by Sebastien Boyesen.

It's called "Man of Steel" and it too is a tribute to the men who made the steel industry which made the town. I don't know if it comes across from my sketch, but what I do think about this statue is that it's quite reminiscent of Soviet Expressionist state art. This is  our square chinned proletarian hero, exhorting his workmates on to greater and greater efforts. Here is another sketch which incorporates the statue: -

The building on the right is Port Talbot's new train station. It isn't exactly ugly, but my God, there's nothing about it to lift the soul.

Daily Sketch: Mortal Coil Statue Port Talbot: Pen and Ink watercolour

This is a statue by Sebastien Boyesen in Port Talbot called Mortal Coil.

I really like it, and it says a lot about the relationship between Port Talbot as a town, and the steel industry. Due to the very muted nature of the watercolour I used on the last sketch, I gave it a bit more oomph with this one.

Daily Sketch: Pizza Hut Building Port Talbot

This is another stage in the development of my urban sketching. I've been reading up on urban sketching, and also looking at examples on line, and I've seen that many people use a watercolour wash - or several watercolour washes to add character and depth to the original pen and ink sketch. So this is what I've tried to do. The scanner does change the character of the colours a little bit  the sky, for example does have some blue in it on the original page, while there is a slight violet tinge to the road.

Daily Sketch: Hero the Cat

Hero the Cat

I actually made this one a couple of days ago, but didn't post it in the blog, only int eh diary. So you might not have seen this one yet. I don't know that I'm going to be able to make a sketch today, so I thought I'd put this one up just to keep things going.