Whistle Stop Tour (Part 2)

Two rather long months since my last post!  No, I didn't forget to post, I just got busy.  Yes, I know I always say I'm busy, but apparently I didn't know what busy actually was before, because things got a lot busier.

But I'm here now, and not busy (partly due to being sick, and thus not at work; and partly due to my Son's friends being over, ruling out having some quiet recovery time on the couch).  Things do seem to have calmed down generally, but there are still some busy weekends ahead, and of course I usually post on weekends.

Anyway, on with this post, which is taking me all the way back to July and my trip to the UK.  I go on trips to the UK semi regularly of course, but this time I promised some friends I'd take pictures so they can see what my hometown looks like.

I didn't actually get to go into the city center (except once, when I was drunk), so there's a lot of 'suburban' stuff to follow.

Whistle Stop Tour (Part 1)

This will be a rather unusual post, in that there will be photographs, and no paintings.  It's possible there will eventually be paintings based on some of the photographs, but if that happens it will be unrelated to this post.
It's also a rather late post, because, as has been pretty standard this last year, I've been busy, or distracted, and sometimes both at once.
Finally, it's going to be a boring post, at least to the vast majority of you.  This is the blog equivalent of looking at Auntie Ethel's holiday snaps, except instead of photos of the Taj Mahal, she took pictures of a tree in the Mughal Garden.  I didn't go anywhere near India though, and the photos that follow are from Mexico.  If you're still daring enough to see what follows, read on.

Sketching - October to December '13

Yes, I've managed to go almost another month between posts, and in all honesty I didn't get as much done in that time as I would have liked in order to share with you over the next one.  It's not that I've been doing nothing, just that not much of it is the sort of stuff this blog covers.  One thing that is related though is that I've been doing some general 'housekeeping', and I'll get into that further down.  Part of the housekeeping has been to actually start compiling the 8 months of sketches I'm behind on sharing, and that's the focus of today's post.  There are also some speedpaints for me to share, but that will probably be next week's entry.

I'm ditching the usual format of these sketching posts until I get caught up.  Usually I compile all the sketches for the time I've been lax and they're organized into different images by what they're of.  This time there's one image per month, with everything lumped in together.  It's marginally more manageable this way, so I'm more likely to do it.

Trains, Planes, Cars and a Boat

There, that wasn't so bad a wait was it? I'm back, obviously. Where've I been? The UK, again. Usually there's quite a gap between trips, but this one was a mere 7 and a bit months. We went again so soon because of my Cousin's wedding, and it turned out to be one of the most mental trips I've ever been on. It'll be a while before I go again unfortunately, but next time we plan for it to be a little more relaxing.

This post is going to be a little different from most as I want to get down things that happened on the trip so I can remind myself just how crazy it was compared to the usual ones (which are rarely boring). I'll fit in the sketching I did first though. I don't really care if you don't want to read all the text - this one is for my own benefit; feel free to check out the pictures and ignore the text if you want to.

Sketches on a plane (and elsewhere)

And I'm back. Normal programming will resume shortly, but until then some short messages.

I don't have any short messages of course, but I do have some sketches I did while in the UK; which is where I've been for the last three weeks. I didn't sketch as much as I may have liked, mostly because I was either too busy running around with the family or I was drunk with friends (or of course recovering from being drunk with friends before running around with the family...). So, I'll post most of what I did and divide it up into relevant topics - From Life, From Photos, From Memory and Free Sketching; with a little write up after each. Ok,let's do this.