Old cars and engines

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.

Sea view

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside/estuary.

Lovely sunset, tried to capture the colours but because it was getting dark I couldn’t see the colours if the pencils and if I had put the light on I would not have been able to see the view….

I do like sketching instead of photography but in this case the coloured pencils did not do it justice…

Anyway it was another gorgeous day in the sunny UK. I have just read a short story by another blogger about the world drying up through man’s insatiable needs. I do wonder if this is further proof of global warming.

So much to mull over….