Thursday, 17 July 2014

A Pen and Watercolour Sketch of Deal High Street in Kent.

This pen and watercolour sketch of Deal High Street in Kent today
has some elements of optical illusion, which I don’t think would be easy to achieve with a camera. Nothing much you understand, for me anyway just enough to make it interesting to look at.
 

At one point during the sketching, when I had done the top, the buildings down about as far as the shop signs, the street became very crowded – something like it does with foreign students – but in this case with what I assume were ordinary Deal shoppers but it was as if they were in a slightly different dimension.



You will have to excuse me wittering on here artistically at the moment I am in the middle of a pair of parallel paintings and drawings – one an oil on canvas and the other a pen and ink – I think I will call the result, if I get one “The Impossible Bookshop”.  These are loosely based on the Pugin designed library in St Augustine’s Abbey in Ramsgate, a building that has the feel of MC Esher, where one expects to find an ape under the desk.
 Some thoughts on starting oil painting – which I am – here. If like me you don’t get much time and need to get it out and pack it away quickly a box that holds everything which doubles as an easel, called a french easel is a great help. I took the pictures below on opening mine up, note you can leave the paint on the palette in it and it doesn’t come into contact with anything else.






I got a bit more time on my oil painting, for me it seems to be easiest to work from the top left, so I don’t stick my hand in the paint, well here is a close up, as you can see I am learning brush control at the moment. 
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2 comments:

  1. BillJuly 17, 2014 7:37 pm

    Nice sketches, i think i will follow you to Deal, having had to park down by the Queens head in Ramsgate , and being charged £2.00 per hour, talk about "rip of thanet". i guess Miles bar, Queens head et al are all paying the price for TDC iniquitous parking policy.

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    Replies
    1. Michael ChildJuly 17, 2014 9:21 pm

      Bill I guess the answer here is that if you choose the most expensive parking in Ramsgate, right in the middle of the café culture overlooking the harbour or the most expensive in Margate on the pier, then you may feel you have been over charged. I would say that considering the weather today you were lucky to find a space there at all.

      There is plenty of cheap or free parking close by, in Deal I usually park in the car park at the end of the High Street which is about 80p per hour. I seem to remember that the one right on the seafront is dearer.

      In Margate the Winter Gardens car park is free and I usually park there and walk along the promenade past Turner Contemporary to the town. With Ramsgate we usually use the western undercliffe beach the parking right next to it is free.

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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.