Sunday 27 December 2015

Shopping in the middle of a family Christmas, well a watercolour sketch from Chocolate Café in Canterbury.

A happy Christmas to one and all, I have diverted into a long family Christmas due to my bookshop being closed from Thursday to Monday, five days which is about the most it has been closed for since I opened here in Ramsgate in 1987.

I don’t think independent booksellers get much in the way of holidays since the invent of Amazon about twenty years ago, though I have no complaints about this as I don’t work very hard and the work I do do I enjoy. Lying in the sun has no appeal and sketching which is the leisure activity I most enjoy seems to have unpredictable ability factors for me, sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t.


Here is today’s watercolour sketch in Chocolate Café in Canterbury, which I think falls somewhere in the middle of can and can’t paint. The pencil is there for scale, so I suppose you could describe the sketch as disappointingly small. If you want it as a Christmas card, then it’s wise men consuming chocolate on a journey to an epiphany. I don’t think there are any sudden realisations to be had in this post, at least not by me.


Painting people this small, which seems to me to be as good a starting point as any is beyond my travel brushes, so I use Winsor and Newton 7s, mostly the 000 and 1 size at the top of the picture.

If you buy brushes this small I recommend going to a shop like Lovelys in Cliftonville where you can try the brushes before you buy them as each brush has different characteristics when you get below size 1. You may get them much cheaper online, but they man never form a proper point, which is the main point.


Another way is to do a fine pen sketch and colour it in with watercolour, like this. My take being however I go about it, eventually the bigger pictures will get better because of doing the small ones.

Anyway that is my main contribution to shopping in the post Christmas sales, I did actually go into a shop there as my son wanted to buy a camera.


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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.