Best Way to Spend ….!

Best way to spend a loose hour waiting to have a prescription filled! Urban Sketching. Fortunately, I suspected I might have a bit of a wait and had wisely chucked my sketching kit into my backpack. As I was cycling and have a honking big hill to push it up to my house (my racing bike is 30 years old and from the selection of 21 gears only one works), I had to have some serious thought about how much I was going to carry. 

And here we are back at the Rococo Garden in Veitshöchheim, if you read my blog you’ll know that I spent a lot of time sketching here during last summer. The garden is so vast you can always find something to sketch and if not the Rococo stone benches are great for catching some sun and watching the carp swimming around. This is a sea serpent kind of thingy that spouts water every hour (I think). Last year I gave Pegasus atop Mount Parnassus a go here but animals really are not my forte and he looked more like one of Thelwell's (showing my age now!) ponies with a huge fat bottom and stunted legs. As these sea monsters don’t exist (as far as we know) it doesn’t matter if its bum is too big, yey! As it was quite covered in moss it was unshapely anyway, that’s my excuse and I'm sticking to it. 

There were quite a lot of tourists milling around and the time passed quickly. In Bavaria lots of the church clocks chime the full hour and every quarter hour and it’s surprising how quickly an hour passes. 

So and here’s my kit: 

I use pretty much the same kit always, my Sennelier La Petite Aquarell paint box (lighter than metal) 24 half-pans with a couple of pans I've filled myself inserted into the slits where the brush went. I bought a new Faber Castell waterbrush before I went on my hols, so it was there too, a couple of pencils and a Staedler Pigment liner 0.3, a white Uniball Signo pigment ink pen and my favourite Da Vinci dagger paintbrush. This dagger paintbrush has suffered a wee bit on my last trips because it is very long and the bristles get bent in my bag, so maybe I need to check out a travelling version. 

A wee tip, although I usually take carbonated water on my travels, if you put it into the tank of a waterbrush it just leaks out onto your paper, so last summer I used the water from this pond when my brushpen was empty, duck and carp poo and all!