Ferry Complete

I’m aware that I’ve not posted here for rather a long time; life intervened in the form of exams, followed job and then apartment hunting.

An apparent loss of a work ethic didn’t help either.

One long running project (starting in 2015 and last seen in 2016) was a picture of a post van approaching a ferry, which had essentially become a series of false starts. I had (very) a rough version hanging in our dining room, much to the annoyance of my long suffering wife. This hadn’t been annoying me as much because I currently have to live in another town for work but every weekend I’d come back, see it, and vow to make a start, then forget all about it when I left.

While tidying up the ‘work” apartment a few weeks ago in an heroic attempt to rediscover my dining room table, I found a photo that I’d planned to base the picture on, and decided that I was going to finally get on with it, not only that, but I was going to get it finished before coming to the family for a two week holiday.

The last paint was applied 2 hours before leaving, but hey, finished is finished…

The next question was how to get it to the family, as I don’t own a car. Fortunately I do own a long cargo bike.

Equally fortunately German Railways don’t object to me taking it in their trains:

New Year 2018

We have a friend who is an artist, a proper artist who actually knows what he’s doing and earns money and everything. Every year he sends us and a lot of other people a postcard with an ink drawing on it as a new year card, and every year I told myself I’d try and do the same and promptly forgot about it.

This year I finally got myself into gear and drew a sketch of the Wolfstor in Esslingen am Neckar, then inked the lines over several lunch breaks, and possibly in the occasional dull lecture.

Click here to find the mistakes.

Last week we were given notice of about four modular exams, so I’m going to have to stop making pretty pictures and get on with revising. Still, at least I managed to make a drawing this year. Maybe I’ll remember to make the 2019 sketch before the year changes…

You’ve been framed.

After some frantic paint scrubbing the mural at college is about 99% complete. It isn’t perfect but it is as close as I can get. A few more details here and there but then I can put the brushes back in the craft workshop, and the rest of the class can use the sofa in front of it.

I’ll take a proper camera at some point and make better photos too…

Slow and not very sure.

Coming along, slowly.It doesn’t help that I only have about an hour each day, including eating lunch, preparation and cleaning up, so this week I stayed behind when some lectures were cancelled and tried at least to get the whole picture looking a bit more three dimensional.

I’m not entirely happy with the airship, especially the engine, but I’ll see how it strikes me when I get back to college…

More distractions.

More exams loom. This week we have ‘Rechtskunde’ or law. We need to know the law for working with people with disabilities/psychological issues/refugees/young offenders et c,, what rights they have, including extra rights to protect them, and how to deal with different situations.Of course to do this we need to have a working knowledge of the law for everyone else.

It is very boring.

The picture above is my attempt at making it a bit more interesting and rearranging the information to help me remember it.

German speakers: I know “Rectskunde” should be “Rechtskunde”. Pencils don’t have a spellchecker, and by the time I noticed I’d filled in all the gaps…

Sudden vegetation

And suddenly, there were trees, which I can’t claim credit for as they were painted by someone else.

I got myself into gear and started shading buildings. I’ve not been entirely consistent on the direction of the shadows, but it has worked so far. As is probably obvious, I started in the lower right and I’m working across. The buildings I’ve done so far exist, which makes things easier. Once I’ve done them, I’ll run out of excuses and have to work on the grey lumps of the ‘modern’ buildings. These will be more challenging because I’m making them up as I go along, and also because I’ll have to evict people off the sofa beneath it…

Sketchbooks don’t cause this sort of trouble…

Urban transit

I was looking for something that wasn’t a half finished picture of Stuttgart, and came across this in a notebook. It is a stempunky monorail again, probably a bit closer to the centre of town than this one, although I wouldn’t want to hang around in the streets after dark. Come to that, I’m not sure I’d like to stand on the tiny metro station at the top of that tower…

More colour…

Colouring increases. A bit too much in the case of the grass in the middle. Still, its getting closer to the idea…

Colour, back by popular demand…

Rather poor qualiy image of the mural at the end of the Friday afternoon session. This was a completely revised drawing: #4, I think, t´with the ‘quadratura’ effect rather better emphasised than in previous versions. All the pantiled roofs and stone/whitewashed walls are blocked in.

The large grey shape top left is an airship flying frankly dangerously low over a populated area. Painting in the engine will be interesting, especially as I have no clue what a real airship engine should look like but never mind, people are enjoying the process and feel able to join in, which is the main thing…

More to come next week, along with shadows and texture, but right now all I want to do is sleep…

And now in colour, briefly…

The mural is progressing:

This is now a historical document: the mural here was a ‘first attempt’ to see how we could mix colours and apply them on such a big area, so to the horror of several people I pulled it down and threw it our this week, and drew a new design directly onto the wall. Photographs will follow as soon as there’s something to see.