I managed to get a window seat in the Turner Contemporary
Café today both for the pot of tea when I got there and for lunch, so I managed
to paint a picture of the view.
I am not very keen on painting from photographs and the
options are limited on a day like today that is cold and wet.
For most of my life I have felt that an important factor in
maintaining a healthy mind is to do something often that one finds fairly
scary, and for me at the moment this is painting in public.
This type of bird photography is done with
mirrors, in case you wondered.
Well one mirror.
The black thing is my new paint box, spending about £40 an
empty paint tin may seem a bit excessive and I will endeavour to explain later.
I also did a quick sketch of The Kiss while I
was at The Turner Contemporary, very quick indeed, with a Pitt Pen, there was a
charming lady also sketching and The Kiss a lot better than I did, so I didn’t
feel quite so exposed doing this one.
I have got most of the red paints in the
paintbox and am working on the browns, more about this later, if I ramble on
some more
Oddly enough there is a lot of comment about music on the
last post, this is an easy house to find a musician in, to draw, so I had a go at trying
to draw a guitar player, so I seemed perhaps that the strings were being
plucked, moving, maybe even making a sound.
Well I have done the deed, all the artist’s quality
watercolours I have acquired in one box with a label telling me what they are.
The main colours I use are down the left side of the list,
the others I use are whites grey and blacks over on the far right.
The main reds I use are the madders, particularly rose
madder, the only browns I use burnt umber and yellow ochre, I don’t use yellows
much, but find I can only get the colour of magnolia buildings mixing naples
yellow and titanium white, most of my washes, sky sea sand, are various
mixtures of, cobalt blue, yellow ochre and rose madder. Prussian blue, brown
madder and vandkye brown are incredibly strong dyes, using them is like the
watercolour equivalent of Russian roulette. I mostly mix my own greens, but
can’t achieve olive green. Davey’s and
Payne’s grey are also something I can’t mix. The rest of the paint in the tin I
wouldn’t recognise, apart from chrome orange.
I always buy paint in tubes and squirt them into pans because
it is much cheaper then buying full pans, but a lot of my mystery paints came
as full pans, basically because I wanted the box that was on special offer,
because the combinations of paints and box was often cheaper than two tubes of
paint. A 5ml tube of paint fills about three half pans.
If I had filled the box up with 48 half pans at between
about £5 and £9 each it would have been very expensive, as it was it was just
expensive. The paint goes a very long way though I would doubt the painting
above has 10p worth of paint on it.
Here are today’s photos, I haven take any of my lunch as it
may offend Chris Wells who commented adversely about this recently, apart from
the large pot of English mustard that came on the plate individually with both
my steak sandwich and my wife’s.
I first assumed it was mustard flavoured mayonnaise, but
fortunately tested it first, instead of slapping it on, possibly it was
supplied this way as a potential emetic fro unhappy diners.
The steak sandwich was excellent by the way and they have
increased the size of the teapots so the ample supply of tea stays hot for
about half an A4 watercolour.
Anyway despite the weather a pleasant day off more than paid for by the books I bought wandering around Margate.
One of the funny moments was when the yellow buses pulled up while i was painting completely obscuring the view.
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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.