Pen and Ink sketches of Canterbury today

Some drawings of Canterbury today, done with only a black Pitt pen size S.

These are done fairly quickly while the rest of my family engage in shopping, this one had to be finished very quickly, so the people are not very good I started drawing the buildings from the top in the middle of the picture working to the left, then the water tower and worked to the right, the bottoms being difficult because of the people in the way.

 This one hardly got started before I was summoned to a bookshop.

Here are a couple of photos on the spot, in case you have become geographically disadvantaged.

 Actually looking at the photos they don't really help much, so I guess you can either recognise what the drawings are of or yo can't. 

Trees are surprisingly difficult in this medium, granted they are just a type of scribble, but the wrong type of scribble and they lack treeness.

The main problem today was finding somewhere to sit in the sun, as it was a bit cold in the shade, with the sun more behind me than in front of me, with some of the old Canterbury buildings in front of me. Most of the public seats in the sun are up the top end of the High Street where a lot of the buildings are modern.

To do the one of the tower with the clock on it I had to buy a coffee at McDonalds to get a seat I could draw it from. 

apologies for repeating an image here, just comparing a photo with the clock vertical which I was focused on with the drawing.

New plans for Ramsgate Maritime Museum

The new plans for the museum have appeared on paper but are yet to be available as computer files. My initial thoughts on the plans is that they are pretty good and probably far and away the best we are going to get in terms of providing an attraction for visitors to Ramsgate there.

Conditions for copying the plans were not ideal and I have done my best, copying the full sheets and then copying close-ups of the blocks of text on the sheets. The pictures should expand when clicked on and the expanded pictures should expand when clicked on again, I hope.

the plans are on display in the museum 
Open 10.30am until 5pm Easter Weekend Weekends and Bank Holidays until the start of the School Summer Holidays School Summer Holidays until end of September Tuesday to Sunday 

The new Cervia website is at http://www.cervia-volunteer-crew.com/ and also well worth a look at. 

Who moved the stone? a five dimensional Easter riddle

Still teaching the youf of today about drawing and vanishing points, I guess this is about what can go wrong when you have two vanishing points. 

New Ramsgate street directory for 1971 published today.

This directory of Ramsgate streets is taken from the Kelly’s Thanet directory for 1971 so it would have been compiled in 1970, many thanks to Kelly’s Directories for giving me permission to reprint their old directories.  

The best way to use the directory to fit together a picture in your mind of Ramsgate at this time, which may include your own memory, is to walk the streets of Ramsgate with the directory as a guide.

The picture on the cover of the book was taken in about 1971 is of The Black Opal a sailing ship rigged as a three masted barquentine, not something you would think it would be easy to forget. She was moored in Ramsgate Harbour’s inner basin from around 1968 to around 1972.

She started life at some time in the first half of the 1900s as a three masted schooner called the Eouls, built as a costal trader with a large two cylinder diesel engine, the hull being one large hold for carrying goods, the sails adding to her speed and economy.

At some time her masts had been cut off at deck level and she arrived in Ramsgate with the timber to make new masts on her deck. During the time she was in Ramsgate she was fitted with a new engine, re-masted and rigged as a square rigger and her hull was fitted out with cabins.

After this she had a chequered history of bankruptcies and ship wrecks including being used in the movie Popeye. She is now high and dry in Malta and used as a restaurant called The Black Pearl. 

The earliest of the Ramsgate street directories I produce is for 1849 and these used in conjunction with the maps provide answers to many of the local and family history questions. Who lived where and the location of local businesses, which helps with dating old pictures of the area.

When using the directories it is important to remember that before 1900 in many cases the street numbers were changed by the rating officer as the town expanded, so it is important to compare the pre 1900 hundred directories with the 1900 directory to avoid mistakes about which building is which.

The original Kelly’s Directories have risen considerably in price since I produced my first directory reprint (Ramsgate 1900 Street Directory) about 10 years ago, then a 1971 Thanet directory sold for about £7 now the price would be between £20 and £30 depending on condition.

This price rise means that I intend to produce several more of the post war directories, making the information in them cheaply available to everyone.  

I have now produced about 150 booklets about the history of this area and have also produced three historic street maps of Ramsgate for 1822, 1849 and 1879 all of which are available from my bookshop in Ramsgate. The shop is open from 9.30 to 5.30 and closed on Mondays and Thursdays.         

If you want to buy the directory online click on this link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ramsgate_street_directory_1971.htm UK postage is free but you will have to use the dropdown to pay extra for postage overseas.

Our secondhand stock of out of print local books is fairly good at the moment, with many of the more difficult titles like The Ramsgate Millennium Book and The Book of Ramsgate I have copies in stock in different conditions at different prices.

I don’t sell the more difficult to find local books via the internet, as if I did we just wouldn’t have them for the customers who visit the bookshop.

Holey Saturday, not quite an optical illusion

With the Easter hols in full swing and not wholly holy one of my tasks is to teach the youf of today about vanishing points and projections in drawing, so sticking to the simplest projection where all the horizontals and verticals are straight parallel lines but there is one vanishing point at eye height i.e. half way up the page on the right hand side.

Which means the artists eyeball is directly in front of the vanishing point, with the questions to the youf being:

1 what happens when the artists eyeball gets closer or further away from the page?

2 what happens if the vanishing point for the hole viewed through the holes is on the left of the page?

3 what about horizontals that are not drawn horizontally and verticals that are not drawn vertically but don’t point to the vanishing point and how near to pointing towards the vanishing point is where a square changes from being badly drawn or wonky to one of its lines becoming involved in the perspective?

After yesterdays post http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/cross-optical-illusion-or-not.html where the youf drew some wholly unholy crosses they are becoming convinced that it is the adults who don’t understand this sort of thing properly.     

Sticking with the theme of the youf of today, one question that old piple (anyone over about 30) ask me as a bookseller, about the youf of today, is do they buy books.

Well one of the most virulent diseases in graduate lane is acute skintitus, for many years students have been asking me, how much will you pay for my textbooks? As I urgently need to buy more beer.

Today with Easter Day probably going to occur tomorrow, many young piple have been frequenting the 5 and 10p section in my bookshop, buying Easter presents for old piple who they hope will give them chocolate in return.

Some young piple have gone even further in these acts maternal and paternal piety and been buying books from the 50p section. 

Of course what the old piple are really sayin is do young piple read books? And I guess the answer did anyone read Harry Potter just isn’t the answer they want.

My family has run general bookshops in ordinary towns for a long time, much longer than my lifetime, and a big factor here is there are a lot more and a lot better children’s books around.

Things have come a long way since Bigears first went out on his bicycle and felt a little queer.

The key here though is with the schools, the ones where the children are expected to fill in a questioner:

Is this a xxxxxx I see before me?

A; rice pudding

B turnip

C dagger

D knife

Type of thing, the children at these schools tend to excel at reading, possibly because their teachers have to read the books to write the questions.     

Cross, optical illusion, or not?

Coming back to the picture above, which I drew this morning to amuse the youf of today here, first I should say that this isn’t an optical illusion in the sense that there is some sort of trick in the drawing.

It relies on the human brains propensity to see what isn’t there, by this I mean that the cross – Good Friday type of cross – is as it were, fairly nailed in all of our minds, the image we see is strongly affected by the image that is already in our brain.

So our brain tries to make the drawing of a cross shaped hole into a cross shaped solid.

The drawing is about the simplest projection you can draw, all the horizontal lines and all the vertical lines are parallel, or the would be if I could sketch perfectly, and all of the angled lines lead to one vanishing point.

Of course if you photograph this all the lines will be slightly curved, because the camera’s lens is curved and unlike the human eye doesn’t have the human brain to compensate for this, so we see straight lines aa straight lines.

Of course the artist in this sense is trying to do two basic things, one is to show the straight lines as straight lines, which they really are, and the other is to draw what is really there, strange that the camera has difficulty achieving both of these things.    

John Snow Exhibition at the York Street Gallery in Ramsgate

John is a Canterbury based artist who produces a mixture of figurative and semi-abstract work, mainly in acrylics, which frequently reveals traces of his graphics background. His first one-man show features a variety of subjects, including lots of trees and a few abstracts.

The exhibition runs -- 16th Apr - 23rd April.

I have added a few extra shots of the gallery below

All the pictures should expand if clicked on.