Here is the painting of Palace Street in Canterbury, if you
put “Palace Street Canterbury” into Google click on the maps tab, and drag the
little yellow person to the south end of Palace Street then spin the compass
you can see the bits I got wrong.
For the lazier aspiring art critic here is a photo.
While I was painting this picture several people asked me if
it would be for sale and the quandary I now face is that it cost me a lot to
paint. I think about 5 visits to Canterbury at say £5 to get there, about 5
double sessions in La Trappiste i.e. pot of tea and sandwich during the morning
and lunchtime at about £7 for a pot of tea and sandwich, £3 for pot of tea and
cake during the afternoon sessions. So £15 per day for 5 days is £75, somewhere
around 15 hours actually painting it what’s the minimum wage about £6.50 an
hour that’s £97.50 then mounting and framing, perhaps £20 paint and paper about
£1.50.
Of course I can paint a watercolour this size much faster,
particularly if I took a photo of the scene home and copied it, this way I
reckon I could do the whole thing in about 3 hours about £20 at the minimum
wage.
Much faster if there is no one about, standing in the way
and so on
this one of Dover took about 4 hours including drinking two
cuppas, but it doesn’t have all that detail in the Canterbury one.
This one of Dover took about half an hour.
All the watercolours are the same size 10 ½ x 7 inches.
I could do some prints of the watercolour, another option is
to copy the painting in oil paint onto canvass, I reckon I could do one 4 times
the size i.e. 21 x 14 inches in about eight hours, about £5 for the paint and
about £5 for the canvas and about £50 at the minimum wage.
All of this is an academic exercise as I don’t make my
living from painting, the devil is in the detail with this type of watercolour,
so far the paintings I have disposed of I have given away.
I am beginning to understand why I don’t see lots of other
people out painting as a way of making their living.
At the moment if you want the picture I recommend you click
on the image at the top of the posts to enlarge it and print it out.
I did buy some books for my bookshop in Canterbury today, which did cover the costs and will appear on the bookshop blog http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/
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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.