Crayon
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Tall & Slender
I saw this handsome plant sitting in a corner of the greenhouse in the RHS Garden at Wisley. At the time I didn’t note the name of the plant – however the self-proclaimed AI on my phone seems sure that it is an Agave plant, which would be more at home in the arid regions…
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Fishing Boats
The fishing boats in Negombo keep different hours to the tourists. We saw some of the boats still at sea whilst we were having breakfast, but by the time we were walking around the town the fishermen were all back to unload their catch, repair their nets etc. The boats were all quite colourful, and…
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Tram
I know we now have trams in England again, but to me the sight of a tram on the streets of a continental European city still feels rather satisfyingly foreign. I was pleased therefore to discover there are many trams in Budapest. This particular unit is running along the “Pest” bank of the Danube, where…
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Vittoriosa
The old town of Vittoriosa was once an important place. Originally known as Il-Birgu, it became the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller when they established themselves on Malta, and following the successful repelling of an Ottoman siege in 1565 it gained the name Città Vittoriosa (Victorious City). Today it is much quieter, and there are…
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View From A Plane
I suppose most of us have seen this type of view, which is both constantly changing but which also seems to have stayed the same throughout the many hours of the flight. For the record the photo from which this is drawn was taken during the descent of a flight into Singapore, and from the…
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Stained Glass – Christ Church
A while ago we showed some American friends around Oxford. Their reaction to all the old buildings was of course quite predictable, but what I hadn’t expected was that their awe would also make me appreciate again buildings that had become all too familiar. One of these, the cathedral in Christ Church, was an oasis…
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Spotlight
This is my first attempt to draw on black paper. I used a white pen, so one might imagine that the approach is basically the reverse of the more normal black-pen-on-white-paper drawing skills that I have been honing. So for example, the pen has to mark highlights rather than shadows. It turns out that things…
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La Pyramide du Louvre
This rather well known juxtaposition of ancient and modern architecture needs very little introduction from me. Suffice it to say that this combination has its fair share of both admirers and detractors. The contrast between old and new is somewhat muted in this picture by the twilight illumination and also by both being rendered in…
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Reigate Heath – Grass & Cow Parsley
I don’t normally see these plants at eye level, but that is the view I wanted so a certain amount of crouching down was necessary to take the photo from which this scene was drawn. Worth it though – the contrast between the foreground and the background in particular is very pleasing, to me at…
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Black Mountains – Lower Slopes
Trees present an interesting drawing challenge. There is (normally) just one trunk, then a few main branches, then many smaller branches and finally many, many leaves. However, if one sketches the same level of detail for each leaf as is given to the trunk then the drawing will never be finished! This particular tree is…
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Ostrich
To drawing something, it is of course necessary to figure out where everything should go on the paper – the relative sizes of the objects in the scene and how they all fit together. So it was that when I drew this ostrich I was quite surprised to discover just how small an ostrich head…
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Under Reigate Hill
Well obviously this isn’t really “under” the hill – this is the path that runs from the main Reigate Hill road to Wray Lane, and so the path effectively runs across the foot of the hill. However, to me the phrase “under the hill” sums this up rather well and I get to choose the…
Doodling ... 