Which is the odd one out? Oh I love that game in “Have I got News For You”.
Answers on a postcard, in the meantime I will concoct a convoluted answer.
Images of London, for a project. Do not adjust your tv sets, this is black and white. No, I haven’t lost my coloured paints.
For those of you watching in black and white, Jack the Ripper is the one in grey.
This is the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields, where several of the Ripper’s victims drank (and the rest) before meeting unfortunate endings involving bits of them being mailed to the local bobbies. They never caught the Ripper, but I bet he was a bit of tearaway.
I love the French name for him, Jacques L’Eventreur. I love all the foreign names for him: Jack lo squartatore (Italian), Viiltäjä-Jack (Finnish), Jack Trbosjek (Croatian), Kuba Rozpruwacz (Polish), Seoc an Reubainnear (Gaelic), Джак Изкормвача (Bulgarian), ג’ק המרטש (Hebrew), Jack Bantha-poodoo (Huttese). Okay, maybe not the last one.
Originally he was known as Jack the Perforator, but the papers didn’t like it. These days, he would probably be called a Tearorist. Oh come on, it’s late, gimme a break here.
An ink attack on the page by the Copic pen, fresh from drawing every single line in fleet street, on night two of ‘sleep-training’ (it went very well too). I wanted to draw more bare trees again, but this time with buildings behind them, so I went back to a photo from London back when I lived there, and was studying nearby this place: Temple Church, off Fleet Street, former HQ of the Knight’s Templar, now a busy destination for tourists bugging the priest about the (inappropriately titled) Da Vinci Code, and medieval students looking for William Marshall (guess which of these two groups I fell into).
Sleep-training the baby is not fun, especially if the baby stubbornly refuses to sleep. During that process, going in and checking on him every ten minutes (as per the book), I got the Copic pen out last night and drew lots of little lines, that eventually ended up looking a lot like Fleet Street in London (my favourite street); there’s the church of St. Dunstan in the West, there’s the Royal Courts of Justice, there are offices of newspapers past and present (well, not many present any more), there are the clocks I was watching closely.
I love that part of Hampstead Heath by the big ponds, especially those big multi-windowed brown brick houses clustered along the edge. That’ll be them above. Not sure I’d like the famous night-time entertainment though; all those politicians out looking for votes, as it were.
Did this drawing over a couple of evenings (interrupted by baby-feeding). Below is the work-in-progress.
Actually it’s just down Fleet Street. First Irish pub in London (c. 1700), first pub outside Ireland to serve Guinness. Possibly the inspiration behind the song, at least I used to tell people that on the tour-bus. Well, it is a long way from Piccadilly and Leicester Square, if you really need a Guinness. Personally I don’t really like the stuff. Too much iron; turns your poo black, and leaves you open for an attack by mutant villain Magneto.
This is the magnificent Maughan Library on chancery Lane, part of King’s College London. Here I studied every day while doing my MA in medieval English, and I loved this building. It used to be the public records office.
Now I think I’m tenacious in my sketching. I go out in all weather, just to get a drawing in the moleskine. Admittedly I live in Davis, so the weather is usually very changeable – one day it’s hot and sunny, next thing you know it’s hotter and sunnier, can’t keep up. Back in London it rained almost every day; on Monday I went back to the South Bank with 
Simon, where we sketched in sunshine a year previously. It was ok while we were under a tree, and the clouds merely threatened us like hoodies in a chicken-shop doorway – that’s when I did the pic to the left there, drawing someone with absolutely no resemblence to my sketching pal. But then we moved on, and I started to draw the banks of the Thames by Oxo Tower, but rain stopped play.
For me, anyway. Si sketched on, disregarding any silly rain, his sketchbook getting slowly drenched, now unable to erase any pencil marks. But he was on a roll, and did a fine pencil pic 
with lots of detail. I chickened out, and finished mine off later (the top image). It looks like it’s a monochrome, but I guess this is actually a colour picture, since that’s exactly how it looked that day. London was an exercise in greyscale waiting to happen (it sometimes is in the summer).
Prior to that, there was lunch in Shepherd’s Bush, at cafe rouge, and I did this sepia picture of the mirror while we ate. Not exactly the bar at the folies bergeres, more the cafe at the buisson des bergeres. Kinda.
Parts 10 and 11 of the Sketchbook Project, and I’m wondering if the world actually needs saving, I mean once someone sets themselves up as a saviour then we’re in all sorts of problems, aren’t we. Perhaps we then need saving from them? Or their followers, or their enemies?
And never ever trust a politician who runs their election on “only I can save you”. Over and out.
A sketching morning in Hampstead, with Si, starting at the tube station, wandering about the high Street and its alleys, then off to the Flask for a good pint of Deuchars. And it didn’t even rain!
petescully 