Thursday 12 May 2016

A sandwich in the Sandwich Shop in Sandwich, bit of watercolour painting of Sandwich Guildhall, Black Men of the Sea and a possible ramble…

We went to Deal and Sandwich today, the Kent towns that is, bits of shopping and some books to look at, some of which I bough for my bookshop.


Stopped for a cup of tea in The Sir Norman Wisdom, the Wetherspoon pub of that name, the view from this pub


isn’t really good enough to draw, what could be an interesting run of art deco shops spoilt by lack of conservation, so I didn’t stop to eat and sketch there.


On to a lunchtime sandwich in the Sandwich Shop in Sandwich and a crack at Sandwich Guildhall for a while.


The photo is never going to be like the sketch, which in never going to be like a sketch of a photo.

I have tried all sorts of pens and pencils for this sort of sketching, which is drawing buildings small and fairly detailed, now I find just use watercolour paint and a brush, if things go badly wrong I just throw it away and start again. Otherwise I just periodically hold the sketchpad up in front of what I am drawing and go over the bits that look most right with more paint.

I would say that if you use thin enough watercolour paint sparingly enough you don’t need to be able to draw very well to get something that looks fairly ok after enough time.

I would think it unlikely this painting will ever get finished, it is much more likely I will start again next time as I will probably be on a different sketchpad.


Sandwich Guildhall is a bit of a strange building, inside is the court room complete and as it was in the 1600s but the outside of the building was completely rebuilt using old materials in around 1910 by E J May. What can you call it, seventeenth century Victorian, not an entirely satisfying lump of architecture.


Here is today’s haul of books


The most saleable probably being the Osprey military books


From a customer satisfaction point of view Thomas the Tank Engine in traditional format probably tops the bill, with Mr Benn appearing as if by magic like the shopkeeper a close runner up.     



Ok time to ‘fess up the two books I bought for myself were the Edmund De Waal The White Road and Black Men of the Sea.





No comments:

Post a Comment

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.