i wanna wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep

August 5, 2013Leave a comment

I have to admit, London tired me out a lot this time. I think it was the heat – though naturally cooler than Davis, London actually had a heatwave, which when you add it to the fact that air-conditioning is a very rare commodity (Oxford Street’s shops were no places to cool off) and the overcrowded packed tube was a hellish place to be in hot weather, makes for a very stuffy city. I am not used to crowds and big masses of people any more, so I sought to see my home city in its quieter moments. Even a city that never sleeps dozes off from time to time. On one particular Tuesday, I got up and took the tube at the determinedly pre-rush hour of 5:45am and headed into central London to sketch in the early morning light. I love wandering around a city as it is waking up (preferably having recently woken up myself, rather than stayed up all night, as my much-younger self may have once done). London is no different, although in Leicester Square I did witness the remnants of some people’s night-before, a drunken testosterone match of pitiable proportions that made the street sweepers stop and raise their eyebrows and shake their heads. I’ve never liked Leicester Square. Trafalgar Square on the other hand… I’ve seen a fair few incidents of silliness there among the late-night throngs waiting for their night-buses in the shadow of Nelson’s Column, but when everyone is gone and before the city of the daytime re-emerges, this is an excellent place to stop and really absorb an epic sight. I’ll forever be grateful to London for pedestrianizing that awful north side of the square, the former rat-run outside the National Gallery, turning Trafalgar Square from a pigeon-infested overgrown traffic island to a pleasant place to sit and just watch the world, and this really is the world. The very centre of London, from which point all measurements from London are taken, is just on the other side of the square, at the statue of Charles I. I sketched the view from the northern side in the early morning light, with Horatio Nelson on his high perch looking down Whitehall to the clock tower of Parliament, home of Big Ben. Summer morning light is like a golden custard pouring across the city, and those shadows move pretty fast when that sun rises.

Here are a couple of photos from the process – see what I mean about those shadows!

The morning moved along, some early commuters passed by the Square, the odd rise-and-shine tourist was out taking photos and waiting for the tour buses to start; when I used to tour-guide on those buses years ago I loved the early shift, with all the fresh faced tourists seeing the face of London that most Londoners miss. I sketched some of the buildings on the south side of the Square, whose rooftops I have long wanted to draw. That statue is of Sir Charles Napier, I believe, an old imperial commander, who has an impressive nose and sideburns that Wolverine would be jealous of.

London can be incredibly annoying sometimes, expensive, grumpy, sweaty, time-consuming; but in these moments you get to see it at peace, waking up with a smile, in a good mood.

Also posted on Urban Sketchers London – if you haven’t done so, please check out their site!

tale of two towers

August 4, 20133 Comments

More form the first Saturday back in London… We all took the tube down from Burnt Oak (or rather, the Northern Line rail replacement bus, which for some unspecified reason took us to Finchley Road on the Jubilee Line – it appeared that the driver got rather lost) and went down to London Bridge, to visit the great Borough Market. My main reason was to get one of those really yummy grilled-chicken sandwiches that I had last year. I had been drooling over those for the past twelve months. After we sat and ate them in the gardens of Southwark Cathedral and listened to a little choir singing about how the tory government are destroying the NHS (I joined in the song, of course), we walked down towards Tower Bridge. There was a little event going on in the gardens beside City Hall, so I got a beer and we all sat down in the shade, where I quickly sketched Tower Bridge. My five-year-old son joined me for some father-son urban sketching, and he did his own version! He hasn’t done such observational sketching before so I was well impressed. He was very specific about getting the City of London flag right, that’s my boy.

I love being by the Thames. I have said it many times before, but I’m happiest by the river.

go back to chancery lane

August 3, 20132 Comments

And so back to the London sketches. This was from the first proper day back, and I had just met a few London urban sketchers at the end of their meet-up in Leather Lane. On the walk back to the tube station I remembered this little newsagents on Chancery Lane. For some reason, I want to draw very British things like newsagents. It might sound funny, but we just don’t get many over here, unlike in London where they are everywhere. This one I used to go to a lot for snacks when I used to study every day at the Maughan Library, just down the street. Chancery Lane is pretty quiet on a Saturday, so I sketched peacefully before journeying back on the tube. Here’s one for you: spot the fire hydrant!

back from london / barcelona

July 28, 20131 Comment

Sorry for the lack of postage lately, it’s been that time of year when I go somewhere far away for a couple of weeks or so of disruption to my usual daily routine. Airports…I cannot stand them. When will we develop teleportation technology? But I love London, and I love Barcelona! I am not overly fond of the mountain of scanning that appears when I return from such sketch-filled journeys, so I’ll post gradually. As you can see above, I fulfilled a lifelong dream to sketch the Sagrada Familia, and I also fulfilled another Barcelona-related lifelong dream too, to visit (and sketch) the Camp Nou. More of that later. First though I am scanning my London sketches, which include this one below of Trafalgar Square in the early morning hours.

Stay tuned!

Sketching Jack’s London: July 17

July 3, 20132 Comments

London! Here is a sketching event just for you, a midweek, afternoon-evening sketchcrawl around the old neighbourhood of that notorious elusive villain, Jack the Ripper.

Join us as we sketch around Whitechapel, in search of its past. We will begin at 3:00pm meeting outside Whitechapel tube station, and then sketch individually or in groups. This event is FREE and open to anybody with an interest in sketching, all you need to bring is something to draw with and something to draw on (although I have made some very special micro-sketchbooks for all participants… see photo below).

As with last year’s sketchcrawl around Temple and Fleet Street, I will provide hand-drawn maps with some interesting information (and it will include the locations of the Ripper’s ‘canonical five’ murders). We will finish up outside Christ Church Spitalfields at 8:00pm. There we will check out each other’s sketchbooks, and then maybe pop across the road to the Ten Bells for a pint in the Ripper’s very own local.

Of course, the London of Jack the Ripper is gone. Thankfully, one might add. The slums were cleared, the squalor washed up. The twentieth century happened. The Blitz happened. History happened. Hipsters happened. Yet traces of Jack’s London still remain, some invisible, some ignored, and some pretty hard to miss. In this sketchcrawl, let’s look for the old East End, the smog-chipped bricks, the weather-worn cobbles, the winding streets, the smell of old pubs, the sudden towering steeples, the London that the nineteenth century left behind. Whitechapel, Aldgate, Brick Lane, Spitalfields, the edge of the City. The Elephant Man. The Krays. Jack Sheppard. Ashley Cole. Er, Jack London stayed here for a while. Even Big Ben and the Liberty Bell were born here. Jack the Ripper is gone, a legend for the tourists, but old London is still there, hiding in the modern world, AND WE ARE GOING TO SKETCH IT!!
(or of course, you can just sketch the hipsters…)

specially made ‘sketching jack’s london’ micro-sketchbooks!!!

Hope to see you there!

Facebook event page

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i am a passenger, and i ride and i ride

January 10, 20134 Comments

Been a busy, busy week, with barely a moment to think. Januarys are hectic, and I’ve not had time to do any urban sketching this week. Here though is part of something I have been doing, a panel of a comic. This – not drawn from life – is a scene familiar to so many, waiting for the night bus. To those who don’t know, the night buses in London generally start at Trafalgar Square and then go all across the city, to the ends of the earth, ferrying late-night Londoners in varying states of tiredness or drunkenness or both back home when the tube has stopped running. The N5 was my bus. Back in the olden days, before the north side of Trafalgar Square was pedestrianized, I waited there for the N5, waited and waited until sometimes it was light, in the rain or the cold, with crowds of people or just a few stragglers (but usually with crowds, London at 4am on a Sunday morning is a busy bloody place). More often that waiting would be around the corner, one stop from the beginning, where the fried chicken shop was on Charing Cross Road. Some nights, the N5 just would not come. This was the old days, before Mayor Ken put lots more buses on the street, when you could wait two or three hours for a night bus that should have come hourly. Sometimes there would be one or two other buses, different routes, at your stop when your N5 finally came, only for the N5 to not bother stopping because nobody hailed it down (due to not actually being able to see it coming) – oh those were frustrating days. When I used to go to the Hellfire Club in Oxford Street, it was taking a chance getting on the N5 at Tottenham Court Road because it was usually full up by that point. Going out in Camden was worse, because that bloody N5 would always be absolutely jam packed by the time it reached Camden Town, and you just had to wait for the next one, that was all there was to it. The bus stop was outside the Black Cap, and opposite a 24 hour store where they sold cans of Pepsi Max and really bad sandwiches. Sometimes the N5 would decide inexplicably to stop in Golders Green, about halfway home, meaning another hour long wait and more time spent browsing bags of crisps in a 24-hour store, if it was even open. The most common habit though, and I know that all of you late-night Londoners out there have done this at some point, is the classic fall-asleep-and-wake-up-at-the-end-of-the-line move. Hey, it’s a long journey, and I can fall asleep on a five minute bus trip. My end of the line thankfully was only a mile or so from where I needed to get off, admittedly involving a walk through deserted car-park and dark alley and a walk up the Deansbrook in the cold. That was the N5 – when I was studying in east London and would get the N25 from Mile End to Trafalgar Square, well let’s say when I fell asleep the bus would just turn around and go the other way – one time I ended up in Essex (that’s nothing, once I fell asleep on the wrong train out of Brussels and ended up going into Holland). Those days are long gone – though that night a couple of months ago when I got stuck waiting for the Yolobus in Woodland after the Art Farm event certainly brought all of these adventures back to me (except in London, we do have streetlights).

The night bus, aah, we’ve all been there. Except if you aren’t from London or a big city which has them, in which case you probably haven’t.

a few more from London

June 28, 2012June 28, 20121 Comment

Here are a few more random sketches from London, quick ones done in the small Miquelrius ‘Lapin’ sketchbook. This first one was drawn while seriously sleep-deprived and jetlagged, having wobbled from the plane hours earlier, and stretched out on the couch in my mum’s living room to watch the Champions League Final (Bayern vs Chelsea). Chelsea parked the bus and Bayern lost on penalties, giving Chelsea the trophy – the upshot of which my wn team Spurs don’t make the Champions League next year. Not good. Sleep was much better.

Next day I went to see my brother, and stuck around with him while my nephew went to a football tournament at Whetstone FC (which by the way is miles and miles from the actual Whetstone; I didn’t know this! North-West London is really huge, and all looks the same after a while) There was a lot of time before the torunament began, so I sketched the lads practising. My nephew Leo has suddenly sprouted up (he is twelve and a half) so he towers above most of his team now. I got to see one game before I had to go; I needed a SIM card for my phone because my old one had finally given up the ghost. Nice to see Leo play though, it’s been a few years. They grow so quickly don’t they!

I really would love to spend a day sketching at the Natural History Museum, it’s one of my absolute favourite places, but this was all I could manage, a quick sketch of a triceratops while my son and co sat down for a minute. We had gone down there with my wife and my older sister, who used to take me there herself when I was my son’s age (and back then I knew everything, everything about dinosaurs). My son enjoyed it, for the most part, but was quite nervous all the same. he loves dinosaurs, and is a big fan of T-Rex (not the band), but we had to line up to see the large animatronic tyrannosaur model, and it was dark, and we could hear roaring. Well, he got scared (as I would have, back then; remember the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds, c.1982? That’s another story), so my wife said, don’t worry its not real, it;s just a Robot T-Rex. A ROBOT T-REX?!! Even I got scared at that thought, imagining a huge godzilla-esque lazer-eyed monster tearing down South Ken.

Ah now this is sat outside the Orange Tree in Totteridge Lane. that’s a pub, well more of a restaurant now, that I used to pass by on the bus every day to Barnet College, but have never been to. Apparently Sean Bean is a regular. My friend and I were driving around London and he said he fancied going there for a quick drink, nice old pub, village feel, sit outside. his is the half-pint in that tall thin glass. It was nice, and the food was good, but inside it was just too clean, too modern, too shiny. No old pub feel at all. I couldn’t really do a proper drawing of the building without sitting far away from it (in the pond for example) so jsut sketched what I could, from behind my beer.

On the right, another few quick sketches, made while having a sandwich with my family in Trafalgar Square. We had gone to Buckingham Palace to see the Changing of the Guard, as seen in my son’s Paddington book, and I can assure you I won’t feel the need to go and do that again. Standing around for ages (with a four year old in my arms so he can see through the gates at guards who aren’t doing all that much changing to be honest – can’t they at least juggle or tell jokes?), with loads of other equally bewildered people snapping away with their cameras. It was a struggle let me tell you, so in the end we went down to St.James’s Park, and en route the guards marched past us, back to the barracks. While in the park itself, we were taking a photo on the bridge when a troop of royal Scots guards suddenyl appeared out of nowhere and nearly marched all over us, certainly the surprise attack, all we heard was “OI!!!” We stood aside and they marched onwards without missing a beat. That was funny. So off we went and had some Tesco sandwiches in the Square, the Olympic Clock counting down the days until the craziness begins. I told my son about Admiral Nelson, the famous “I see no ships” story, and the legend of the bronze lions getting up and dancing if Big Ben should strike thirteen.

Finally here is the last one I did on the sketchcrawl, which I tried to scan when I first posted but couldn’t (my scanner broke). I have a new scanner now, so here it is, Fleet Street looking towards St.Paul’s, one of my favourite views in all of London. I think that’s it for London sketches; oh no I have another one from the Jubilee Street Party but that’s for another post.

angels and bus-stops

June 26, 2012Leave a comment

Another north London pub, sketched quickly before meeting up with a friend. This is the Angel Inn on Highgate Hill, a pub I’ve been to many times before (it used to be my local, though when I lived there I went once every few months or so at most, I wasn’t exactly Norm from Cheers). It’s a really nice pub though, warm and welcoming, and in a great location – home was always down hill. I love Highgate Village. There are great views over london, nice little shops, intimate little restaurants and warm pubs, plus it’s near Hampstead Heath. Can someone please pay me loads and loads of money to just draw around the world, so I can move the family back there? Cheers.

Anyway, my bus got there fifteen minutes early so this was what I got, not a bad capture for quaretr of an hour. An example of ‘draw what you have time for’. Know what’s possible in a certain amount of time and do what you can. On the way there, I got off the tube at Golders Green to catch the 210 bus, and had eight minutes to spare, so I also drew the sketch on the right, a rooftop opposite the bus-stop. How did i know I had eight minutes? The nice little LED display at the bus-stop told me so, and it was pretty accurate. That is very handy. I remember it not being too long ago that waiting for a bus in London was a case of ‘anyone’s guess’, but it’s not too bad these days.

I keep meaning to do a big detailed pub interior sketch inside the Angel Inn. Next time, perhaps I will.

down camden

June 25, 2012Leave a comment

While back in London I wanted to get at least one in-bar sketch done, and I usually find it harder to draw at the bar when I’m busy talking to non-sketching friends. So one night I met up with a mate at the Hawley Arms in Camden Town, so I got there a bit early, got a pint (not cheap in London, much dearer than in northern CA), and drew from a little table at the end of the bar. It took about twenty minutes. You can see my reflection if you look hard. I do like drawing bars, there are all the usuals, the beer-taps, the bottles, the little shower things that dispense sodas, and of course the black straws. All bar drawings I do have to have a big stack of those black straws that just seem to get in the way of everything else in the sketch. I don’t see that many people using them, but they always keep them right there.

This was a nice pub, popular with famous musicians I guess (well known for one in particular), though I had never actually been here before, in all the nights I have been out in Camden. I used to go to Camden quite a lot back in the old days – the Mixer, the Dublin Castle, NW1 (in the reverse order of appearance) – so always have to go there at least once on any return trip.

the anchor by the thames

June 23, 20123 Comments

And so on I went down the South Bank, until I came to the Anchor pub, decked out for the Jubilee. It was surrounded by a large horde of shaven-headed lager-drinking chain-smoking England football fans, getting a few in before hitting the tube to Wembley for a pre-Euro 2012 warm-up match against Belgium. All good natured, of course, and enjoying the day with all the tourists and Jubilee celebratories. As I sat down in a nice quiet spot to sketch the historic riverside pub, they all moved off, singing about being off to Wembley, leaving only the passing tourists. I didn’t drawn any of those, they kept moving, so I focused on the building itself. To be fair most people who milled were milling away from this spot and in the pub’s beer garden to the right. I sat for almost an hour and sketched (I did finish some detailing later, but chose not to colour it). One young lady came up and asked if she could ask a wierd question. Depends on how wierd, I replied. How wierd could it be? Not very wierd in fact. “How do you find time to draw?” She was an artist herself it seemed but never seemed to have time for it. I had struggled to find time to do all the drawing I wanted to do on the trip (you wouldn’t believe it) but still managed to get a lot done, because it is really important to me to have drawing time. I get grumpy if I don’t (quite grumpy indeed) so I make sure I find the time for it, even when I’m ridiculously busy. I told her about Urban Sketchers, and the Drawing London groups, and said that by seeing how other people busier even than me manage to somehow fit art into their lives inspires me.

With this sketch of the Anchor, I wanted to sit and do something detailed and old and full of bricks. With this other sketch on the right, Stoney Street in Southwark (near Borough Market), my time was running low so I did a quick about-ten-minute sketch to capture the scene. When time is short, think what you might be able to get in with that time, and be ok with it. I hate watsing time, even though I do it often, when I could be sketching already something else. I went on to the market and had the most amazing grilled halloumi sandwich, right by London bridge. Even thinking of the smell makes me ravenous for more – I’ll say it again, I love coming to this part of London.