Thursday 24 May 2012

Day orf ramble

Went to Sandwich today, the new road is open out of Ramsgate which is interesting, I wondered what the tunnel is for.

Sketched the boats by the river, I seem to be particularly bad at sketching boats, perhaps it was the rather critical looking duck.

Couldn’t quite face supermarket shopping so stopped at the boating pool for a cuppa, very quick sketch.

Westbrook again this evening as the children wanted to go in the sea again, had a bit of a go at a watercolour not really sure if it was good or bad.

All in all not a bad day.

I tried to sort the pictures here out but the computer doesn’t seem to want to play ball, so apologies.


















I haven decided I like this watercolour of Westbrook and set it as background on my laptop for a bit. For those of you who don’t paint with watercolour there are several different ways of using it, one I often use, used in the picture at the top of the previous post, is to add colour to a sketch. There are lesser and greater ways of doing this with a pencil sketch as once the paint is dry it is possible to rub our some or all of the pencil, depending on the type of pencil and how thick the pencil lines were. Another way of using, the one I used in the picture above, is to get the paper fairly wet and mix up some likely colours, then you spread them about on the wet paper trying to control the amount the colours run into each other as the paper dries. You can also lift paint off again using a dry brush, it’s a bit like trying to control an inkblot and what you get in the end is only partially the result of what you intended to do. For me there is something distinct about this sort of picture, done outside from what the painter can see at the time that just doesn’t seem to happen with a more controllable medium, indoors working from sketches or a photograph.     

2 comments:

  1. When I first moved to the area in the late 80s Westbrook beach was much smaller (it almost disappeared at high tide), but there's been a lot of silting since then.

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  2. Strange Peter, I know at some time around 1990 the level of the sand was also higher than it is now, pretty much up to the promenade, I think this is just a case of the sand shifts.

    I know back in the late 60s when Ramsgate Main Sands were at their largest there was some talk that the Goodwin Sands were shifting this way and The Isle of Thanet would become landlocked in a sea of sand.

    Interesting with Ramsgate the accumulation of sand that protected the promenade area in the great storm of 1953 was removed for construing Port Ramsgate, with rising sea levels we my come to regret this action.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.