Ramsgate, poker, motorbikes, is The Stig a woman, Hells Angels and photography, a Sunday Ramble

The pictures decorating this post are of the poker run, basically what happens is that this is a charity motorcycle event where motorcyclists pay a fee to take part that goes to charity.

 At each destination they are given a poker card and the one who wins the poker hand at the end wins the event

 Breakfast conversation this morning was along the lines of as the Williams test driver Suzi Wolff is of the female persuasion could The Stig in fact be a woman.

 I am a bit wary of posting motorcycle pictures after last week, I went to the Margate Meltdown took abut about a thousand pictures of the event, put them on the internet and then got rather a bizarre communication from one of the Hells Angels there asking me to remove the pictures containing Hells Angels.

 Whereas I am fairly happy to publish pictures that KCC, local developers and so on don’t want published, aging secondhand booksellers aren’t really in a position to take on a chapter of Hells Angels so I took the lot down.

 At some time in the future I may go through all of the pictures and try and work out which ones contain who and try to republish some of them, frankly with about a thousand pictures containing several thousand motorcyclists mostly wearing leathers this wouldn’t be an easy task.

 I guess much of the problem here relates to people assuming that I must have some ulterior and probably commercial motive for publishing pictures of local events, the truth of the matter is that I do it because I can.

 If you go to any event there will be loads of people there with cameras taking thousands of pictures but round here, apart form the odd handful of shots it is only the ones I have taken that seem to appear in any quantity on the internet.

 Here are is the link to blog post I did about Margate Meltdown 2011 about 600 photos and about seven videos http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/margate-meltdown-2011-pictures.html so you can have a look and if you want try to expose any commercial motive, in fact any motive apart from trying to publicise the event, so that it continues and is successful. 

 Anyway if you find a photo that you want removed for one reason or another the way to approach this is to email me, address on the sidebar, the web address of the page it appears on, how many pictures down the page it is and a rough description of the picture. If the request is reasonable I will remove it.

I will endeavour to ramble on here.............   Rambling on now.

Have you noticed how you don’t seem to get as much lead in your pencil these days? Brushes seem much as they were, but pencils seem to be thinner on the inside.

I have been working on sketching while standing up today, you wouldn’t think this would be particularly difficult, but I find it so.

We have been shopping at Westwood Cross, this started well as I spent some time in Hobbycraft unscrewing the tops of watercolour tubes to see what colour the paint was and eventually bought a very large sheet of paper.

But sooner or later the question of what I could actually do in clothes shops raised its head and as you can see from the picture above, the answer has resolved into learning to sketch standing up. 

Anyway as I don’t think I can watercolour paint standing up unless I make some specialist paint box that clips to my sketchpad in some way and contains water I have been looking at the dry media.

I think chalk is out of the question, so it is some form of crayon, pencil or pen. 

 We went to Walmer Castle last Thursday and working through my sketchpad I thought I would try a watercolour from one of the sketches I drew when we were there.

I don’t really like painting from photographs and can’t really explain why, there is plenty one can say but that’s how it is.

Photographing paintings is not that easy either the photo above is with flash and the one below without, same painting which doesn’t really look like either of the photos. 

 I am in the very early stages of using better and drastically more expensive paper.

Here is the sketch I used for the painting, drawn looking at the castle mostly through trees, so you couldn’t really tell what shape it is at all.

I used my big paintbox which has loads of colours that I don’t understand, Vandyke Brown, Cadmium Yellow and Brown Madder were the extra ones i used in this picture, I use Brown Madder Alizarin quite a bit and didn’t realise that they haven’t made that colour for about thirty years, the replacement tube wasn’t what I expected.