The Not Taken Vacation: Port Sunlight Village

i was so looking forward to visiting Port Sunlight during our brief stay in Liverpool. While I have enjoyed the Beatles since the 60s, I will say I opted for gardens and museums as I prefer the countryside! However, I expect the foul weather which forced the trip we were on to bypass Dublin carried into Liverpool and rather than a bright spring day, we would have needed galoshes and slickers! So, a rough sketch of a rather lovely bridge and buildings, playing a bit with some things gleaned from my building drawing class.

When I do these not-taken-vacation sketches, I confine myself to my limited supplies I would have been using onboard. And limited room. Elements of the colors I brought with me annoy me no end, meaning no good violet at all. The same with pinks or alizarin. I may visit in my imagination to buy some extra colors….or not. Let’s see where all this takes me!

Art with a Broken Arm

I signed up for two art classes at the local adult school, one in acrylic painting and one in Chinese calligraphy. The acrylic painting class I have to drop simply because I cannot carry an easel, paints, paper, and all the other supplies with me, but I can do the Chinese calligraphy class because the teacher supplies all the stuff and there’s very little that I need to bring to class! That’s great.

Consequently I thought, well, what can I do? I decided to try an online course in drawing buildings and learning from an architect of many years experience. I think this is going to be a really good lesson or group of lessons as I have never been good at drawing buildings and only through a lot of effort and learning about proportions and relationships have I been able to draw this one which is the preliminary drawing prior to any classes at all.

If I say so myself, I did a pretty good job on it and I am looking forward to seeing my progress in the future. There are a lot of tricks that I’m going to learn in this and I will be posting them perhaps as I go along.

And the class begins in 20 minutes!

The Not Taken Vacation: Lambay Island in the Irish Sea

Sailing across to Liverpool, or into Dublin, is Lambay Island seen? I would imagine so.

In imagining my non-taken vacation, I have been looking at a lot of maps and finding all sorts of fascinating things! I have always loved maps and globes, so perhaps my broken arm and subsequent repatriation is not such a tragedy after all.

This is a dreadful scan, but I do rather like the painting itself. One edge of the island is seen, along with sail boats. I would enjoy being onboard one of them in a good stiff breeze.

Do read the link above – Lambay Island seems to be a very nice place to visit.

The Not Taken Vacation: Port at Dublin

It turns out that because of inclement weather, our ship could not land in Dublin. What did they do? Sail past in the wee hours? No idea.

I looked up images of Dublin Port or Dublin Harbor, and here we have what I think must have the commercial part. Cranes, large ships, breakwaters, piers, and who knows what else . . . .