This was the second piece I did at the Asian art museum. The statuette and his shadow caught my eye. I used soft pastels for this (as I haven't used them for quite a while and they've been trying to get my attention recently...)

On Sunday I spent a couple of hours at the Guimet Museum which is the Asian art museum in Paris. I tried my hand at a watercolour sketch of a sandstone elephant carving.
Colours used : Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, Ultramarine and Cobalt blue.

This view was in the gardens surrounding the Sacré Coeur church. Tremendous amount of people about but this was slightly off the main route up the hill. Using the small 12 mini pan Windsor & Newton pocket set. The greens are often the hardest colour to get right. They should usually err on the warm side. I used Sap Green and Viridian and a lot of Burnt Umber for the pine foliage.

Here's the second sketch I did yesterday morning. I liked the downward sweep of the road and the window of sky at the end of it. Again it's more of a drawing than a painting. I guess without the linework there would not be enough structure to it. As the weather (and my ability) improves I hope to concentrate more on the painting and less on the drawing...

One of yesterday's sketches. It was a thoroughly grey day so I had to 'invent' the colours a little bit. I figured if I used warms and cools the net effect would be the grey that things looked. This is more a drawing than a painting. I was standing in the middle of a road junction to do the initial drawing so I had to keep moving away every time a car passed, which was very often   :-)

Braved the cold for this one. Rue de Rochechouart with the Montparnasse tower in the distance. I used the small Windsor & Newton pocket set with the 12 mini pans. Colours used Cobalt and Ultramarine blues, Burnt and Raw Sienna and Burnt Umber.

This morning I found another place in the warm. The café was empty when I went in but I soon had to give up my place for people coming htere to lunch - so I didn't finish... maybe I'll go back later.

Yesterday evening, looking for a place to draw out of the cold, I ended up in the Sacré Coeur. Found a place to park myself so I wasn't in the way of the crowds. This time of year the air is quite humid so the paint doesn't dry so quickly on the page. This is the first painting this year. What do you think?

St John's Street near to the junction with Clerkenwell Road in London. I liked the character of these old buildings.

 A bit of life drawing yesterday morning. We were 7 or 8 people squeezed into a tiny room but good fun nevertheless. I'm quite pleased with the white crayon although it didn't layer easily over pencil. So I sketched the highlights first and then added shadows with the graphite or sienna pencil. The blue paper was Canson and the grey Ingres.

A self portrait in soft pastel from 2005.
Looking a bit stern or maybe concentrating too hard...

Here's one from 1985...
I used to sketch outdoors with a Rötring pen at the time. There weren't as many good fibre tips available if I remember rightly, at least I didn't know about them. Needless to say the nibs didn't last long :-). This is a typical Essex countryside scene. It's a mainly a flat county, with the ancient Saxon field boundaries still very much in evidence which the roads follow.

A selection of doodles. It's fun and beneficial to doodle. Don't tell the boss... ;-)

More museum drawing last weekend at the Musée Guimet in Paris. (Devatä, 12thCentury, Cambodia). It took 2 hours. Graphite pencils 2h and B. I started with the 2H and built up the darker shadows using the B.

Took my nephew to the British Museum in London.
This was from an ancient bas relief depicting the Assyrian Royal hunting party huntng lions. Shame I didn't have time to draw a lion..they were fantastic!
I used a Steadtler Pigment Liner 0.8.