Paris London 2025 Part 2

In September I traveled to Paris and London. See part 1 of my travelogue here.

I went to see two plays in The Globe theatre in London. The first was a one night only performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream that was a reenactment of how the actors in Shakespeare’s time would have performed a play. The actors didn’t rehearse the play beforehand, and they didn’t have the full text of the play to work with, just their lines and their cues and staging directions. They practiced the dances alone, and they had no idea what their fellow actors would do during the performance. Now this is Midsummer Night’s Dream so all the actors and everyone in the audience knew exactly how the story unfolds, but the lack of rehearsals made this a very live performance.

The play was sold out in minutes and I’m glad that I managed to get tickets at all. It was an amazing experience. As this was a one night performance the stage was the bare Globe stage – nowhere to hide as the audience surrounds the actors practically from all sides. There was a lady on stage in period costume, sitting with the full text and helping actors in the very few times that they fumbled. The energy was beyond description. It was the most electric staging of Shakespeare that I have ever seen. Everybody was “on” all the time because they weren’t entirely sure what would come next.

It was a raw performance – I later saw another, standard Shakespeare play there and it was much more polished because it was clearly rehearsed and performed several times before we saw it. Yet that was what made this performance so special – the actors’ reaction to their fellow actors was genuine and unvarnished. They were having fun, improvising, owning the text in a way they normally never do. The highlight was the play within the play at the end – seeing the actors laugh to the point where they had trouble saying their lines because Bottom was so very, very hilariously over the top was amazing.

One of my favourite places in London is the Phoenix community garden. I spent a lot of time there, and sketched it several times. This was my first and longest sketch of the garden, done on the wonderful Etchr Lab cold pressed watercolour sketchbook:

Fineliner sketch – no pencil underdrawing.

We went to see Disney’s Hercules – a new musical in West End. I wasn’t expecting much as I’m not a fan of the movie, but the musical was one of the best that we saw in the London. The production is stunning, the music is great, the actors were talented – particularly Megara – and the only minus is that Hades was a bit over the top even by the movie standards. They would do better to cut down on the amount of his jokes because they lose their impact otherwise. The Disney merch machine was out in full force that night, and I was one of only a handful that didn’t leave with something from their store.

We spent a day in York, and I started it with a sketch of the York Museum grounds, also in my Etchr Labs watercolour sketchbook:

York is full of wonderful bits of history that are just layered freely on each other:

I did a very quick sketch of this scene later on, on an Exacompta Bristol card:

I also bought a decent amount of watercolour paints – enough to build out two new palettes that I want to try.

This post is getting long and photo heavy, so I will be completing this trip journal in two additional posts.

Edit: you can read part 3 here.

Sea Daffodils

The sea daffodils are in bloom, so I made a quick watercolour sketch of them during my Yom Kippur walk.

Paris London 2025 Trip Part 1

I recently returned from a pretty long trip to Paris and London with my family. I ended up sketching a lot more than I normally do during trips, largely thanks to things that I learned during the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Poznan (more on that in a later post). Here is part 1 of some highlights from my trip.

Quick sketch in a Stillman & Birn pocket beta while I was waiting for my flight

Centre Pompidou, my favourite museum in the world, was closing down until 2030 (!) so I went to pay it a last visit. Already parts of the colourful outside facade have been repainted white, and I’ve never seen the area around the museum so deserted.

The library was the only area still accessible, and it had been turned into a giant project playground for German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans to work with. It was something that only Pompidou could do, and it was breathtaking, thought provoking, fun, interesting, and unique. I wish I could have spent hours there, but at this point in my trip I became badly ill and for the entire Paris leg of the trip I was struggling.

I ended up largely not eating in Paris, but this was my first meal there – in the fantastic Patisserie Viennoise in the Latin Quarter.

Stillman and Birn pocket alpha watercolour sketch

We also went to a new museum, the Bourse de Commerce and I saw this great artwork on the way there:

The museum was in between putting up exhibitions, so while a large part of it was closed we managed to view some great and moving art pieces with relatively few crowds and at a discounted price. I did a VERY quick sketch while I was there:

This is the artwork that I was sketching.

And this little fellow is also part of the art exhibits there:

We then took the Eurostar to London. This is where I switched sketchbooks – this sketch of a boy and his father having lunch at a table across from me at Wagamama is the last sketch I created in my Stillman and Birn pocket beta. The beta has decent watercolour paper but it’s not half as good as the paper in my Etchr labs watercolour sketchbook, and the glued in pages make it a struggle to create full page spread sketches, as you can see here:

Last trip sketch in the Stillman and Birn pocket beta.

I created my first sketch in an Etchr lab cold pressed watercolour notebook while in the Greenwich Park herb garden and the paper is astonishingly good. Here’s the ink sketch (my tree sketches have gotten so much better thanks to a workshop I took in Poznan):

And here is the watercolour:

The paper not only makes the colours pop, it actually allowed me ample time and space to work with the washes, adding layers of well blended colours that gave depth and life to the scene. Never have I ever seen the importance of good quality watercolour paper demonstrated so well. I have about half a dozen sketches of this garden throughout the years and this is by far the best one.

That’s it for part 1, I’ll try and upload part 2 later this week.

Edit: part 2 can be found here.

Urban Sketching – Girl with Dog

Quick watercolour sketch in the park today.

Pen sketch before watercolours:

I’ve been travelling and sick hence the delay in posts, but I have a few posts drafted already so hopefully more to come soon…

Morning barista sketch

Went on a 5k run and then went to my favourite cafe and did a quick sketch of the barista. Had more time this morning than last time so this sketch is more detailed.

Quick cat sketch

My parents’ cats in action.

Morning sketch at my favourite cafe

My favourite barista, Orit, at work in Bakery North Dizengoff.

Stillman and Birn pocket beta, Windsor and Newton 0.5 fineliner, Roman Szmal Aquarius watercolours.

Last of the Squill Sketch

Sketched this on location and then it got too hot so I finished it with watercolours (my normal palette, but with more mixing than usual) at home. The paper is a Stillman and Birn pocket beta.

Here’s the original sketch:

Nikecraft ISRU Summer Camp

Yesterday was the last day of Tom Sachs and Nikecraft’s I.S.R.U Summer Camp challenge. Since the 17th of August you could download the ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization) app and participate in a series of “rituals” to earn points towards getting the chance to purchase Sachs’s coveted Mars Yard 3.0 Nike sneakers.

Tape waiting for the Out and Back ritual

So what’s the deal with the shoes? You can see a film about the Mars Yard shoes here, but for me personally they are just cool shoes with an interesting design story. I downloaded the app out of curiosity and even though I participated in all the “rituals” and am currently in the 95th percentile of people on the ISRU app’s leaderboard, I doubt that I will get the chance to purchase them.

I’m writing about this challenge and this app because after a month and a half of participation I think the rituals and habits that I garnered from the experience are worth sharing.

There are six daily rituals in the app, and they were revealed week-by-week. If you plan on participating, I’d suggest adding all the rituals gradually and in the same order that they were added in the app: you are building a set of disciplines after all.

The rituals are:

Ten Free Throws – shoot 10 free throws at something. I settled on a small box and a crumpled piece of paper as a ball, and I use an orange and a black sharpie to keep score on the box. This seems silly but it’s a lot of fun and a quick palette cleanser in the middle of the day.
Output Before Input – if there’s only one ritual/habit that you should take from this it’s this one. When you wake up, don’t reach for your phone. Create something instead. I started out this ritual by journaling, but now I’m sketching in the morning and it’s the best way to start the day.
Out and Back – another great habit – run for 20 minutes, and mark the halfway point. I run for more than 20 minutes usually, and there are rest days when I walk, but this has been a great reminder to get out there and move.
Wall Drawing – tire out your arms with push ups, and then draw a line on a “wall” (either a real one or a piece of paper). Stop when your line touches a previous line or when you lift your pencil up from the wall or when you reach the end. Mark your stopping point with a red X. This is a way to get push ups and some interesting artwork done.
Read Before Bed – read a physical book before bed instead of staring at a screen. Excellent ritual, and one that I really needed.
Medicine Ball – create your own medicine ball out of cans, bubble wrap and duck tape (I used the one in the gym), and perform 5 daily exercises with it.

Apart from these there was a one time “Choose Your Ritual” challenge where you had to create a 1 minute or less movie about your ritual and upload it to the app. This was a tough challenge, but it got me to learn iMovie and how to edit videos on my phone, so I really appreciate it.

Even though the challenge has ended I’ve decided to continue doing these daily rituals and updating the app. These are just good habits to have and the ISRU app is a pretty great habit tracker for these.

There are also some great films that were uploaded to the app as part of the challenge. My favourite is How to Learn How to Surf.

How about you? Did you participate in the challenge? Are you interested in any of these rituals?

Trying out a Renesans Paint and Brush

As part of the Urban Sketcher’s 2025 Symposium in Poznan I got a very generous goodie bag filled with art supplies from the Symposium sponsors. One of those sponsors was Renesans, a Polish art supply manufacturer, and they gave us a half pan of Kassel Earth extra fine watercolour and a number 3 synthetic watercolour brush.

Today I decided to try them out. I used a Stillman and Birn pocket beta, a Staedtler 0.8 pigment liner and only the Kassel Earth watercolour and the Renesans brush. This is the result:

It’s a sketch of a beautiful building across from a pond in a park in Poznan. I drew it from a photo that I took during my morning run through the park. I was planning on returning to the park during the Symposium but I ended up not having time.

This is the sketch:

I used some of what I learned in the symposium to create more realistic trees.

I rarely sketch in monochrome so this sketch was a challenge. It’s about seeing the grades and shades in a scene, and not the colours, and that’s a hard exercise.

This is the paint and brush on the sketchbook:

And this is a swab of the paint. It’s a classic Van Dyke brown, artist grade quality. The brush was surprisingly good, especially for a synthetic brush. It retained quite a lot of water, and it has a good, sharp point.

Though the paint pan has bubbles in it, which isn’t great, I am happy with the quality of the paint and I would consider using Renesans watercolours in the future. The brush is excellent and I am adding it to my rotation. What a wonderful gift to get!

Writing at Large

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Author: writingatlarge