New paintings and regular art updates.
Name your top three pet peeves.
They go together
Revved engines
Traffic fumes
The smell of petrol and diesel.
More than pet peeves
Dangerous to the planet
But when a motorbike
Or a car,
Revs it’s engine at the bottom of our hill
Then speeds up
Exhaust banging
Then I’m really peeved!
What is your favorite place to go in your city?
A working pottery at Middleport, Stoke-on-Trent, England. It also includes a museum, with lots of industrial archeology. They sell various tableware in the pottery shop, there is a large selection of patterns for sale. There is a good cafe that overlooks the Trent and Mersey canal. There are small studios for artists and potteries, and a row of shops opposite the entrance to the pottery with small galleries and crafts for sale.
There is also a handsome bottle oven facing the canal that was covered in bright red ceramic poppies to commemorate Rememberence day a few years ago. You only have to pay to go round the museum section. Tucked towards the far end of the site is a working steam engine which runs at various times. I’m not sure exactly when? Worth taking the time to visit if you can find it (it’s tucked down some narrow side streets.
It also hold pottery classes and was also used for the great pottery throw down a few years ago to before it moved to the Gladstone pottery in Longton.
I went up to Burslem School of Art today and after looking around downstairs we went and had a look at the first floor. There was a lot of work by a local school. There were also these train engine models that had been made of balsa wood.
I don’t know their history but one has a named City of Stoke-on-Trent. If my hubby has been there he would have known what type of engine it was and who originally made it. He’s very good at recognising them.
I added my easle yesterday. Today I’m showing you my easle two years ago, I did a painting of Etruria Flint Mill. It’s also called Jessie Shirley’s Bone and Flint mill I think? It’s the only working Steam driven Flint mill in the country and the flints and bone were crushed and ground using the power of the steam driven beam engine there.
The buildings are part of Etruria Industrial Museum, a complex of cafe, the museum displays, and the Flint mill on the Trent and Mersey and Cauldon Canals at Etruria, Stoke on Trent. I’m not sure of its opening times. But once a month it used to be fired up and you could watch the fly wheel rotating round and the pans where the flints were ground rumbling as the engine turns them. Its amazing to see the industrial archeology of the potteries in action.
A 2-6-2, 3MT, Graham Farish, British Railways, mixed traffic, ‘n’ gauge railway engine. Modeled on a steam engine built in about 1962 during the last day’s of steam trains in Britain before they were axed in favour of type 2 diesel engines.
My hubbies latest train for his n gauge railway layout. It’s a very fine engine and has a very delicate mechanism. He’s happy. X
My hubby collects n gauge and oo gauge model trains and has set up a layout to play with them. He knows that this is an 044 side tank M7, southern railway engine…. just from looking at a photo. He said its an old fashioned steam engine that was introduced in about 1964. I find it fascinating that steam engines are still being used across the world. Maybe they will be used for decades to come? His layout is basically an oval with a siding. When it’s set up I will add a photo. The layout had been stored with cobwebs and possibly a spider or two for the last few years, but we’ve decided to release it into the wild (of the garden shed). It is about to become friends with the hedgehogs and the stray cat. I hope it survives.
This is what you see when you take off the top of a toy trail (a rovex triang-hornby, 262 side tank.). Prairie wheel arrangement. My hubby decided to fix it, it’s about 60 years old and hasn’t been working for most of that time, though it is now. After taking the top off by unscrewing the top of the model, you can see the workings of the engine. After cleaning and oiling the toy train is now in working order. Ignore the batteries in the photo, my hubby thinks you can never have enough of them for use in his torches!
Today I had a break from my exhibition for an hour, so I went and sketched a few of the classic cars. I have to say there were a lot of Austin and Morris cars, plus things like the Scimitar car that I drew.
Each sketch took between 10 and 15 minutes. I tried to be accurate, but when you are standing in a field with cars or engines, people have a tendancy to walk in front of you or stand in the way.
Drawing is slow motion photography I guess you could say, you click a camera, but your hand and eyes have the effort of coordinating to get an image. It’s not easy to draw a new subject. Wheels can be too big or small. A bumper might be too high up, and cut across where the radiator grill should go. Also when you use a thin nibbed pen you have the difficulty of getting dark areas without wanting to spend ages cross hatching.
Movement is another problem, while drawing the diesel engine I tried to get a feeling if the spinning motion, but it started to get messy. There are so many pipes and wheels and tubes. I have no idea what bit does which action, its hard to link things up in your head.
Anyway I took photos of the cars for comparison, I may paint some of them.
Mallaband-Brown