Paris London 2025 Part 3

In September I traveled to Paris and London. See part 1 of my travelogue here and part 2 here.

I met up with a dear friend for a pre-theatre tasting meal at Chotto-Matte, a trendy restaurant that combines Mexican and Japanese cuisines. I am not a foodie, and I will now confess that this was the first time that I’ve had sushi (I hate the smell and taste of fish and seaweed and everything that comes from the sea and so I’ve avoided it), and I really enjoyed it. It was the best meal that I had in London, and the company, the weird design and the very attentive service added to it.

I had the vegetarian pre-theatre menu, which meant that mine had no fish, seafood, meat or chicken in it. It was phenomenal.

On the right is the Edamame, which we shared and was good, and in the centre is Truffled Avocado Roll – Cucumber, sesame seeds, yuzu truffle soy. It was light and refreshing.

Lychee Ceviche – Leche de tigre, chive oil, sweet potato, Peruvian corn, coriander. One of the biggest surprises of the meal. Delicious, zingy and the textures were phenomenal.

Yasai Miso Crispy Sushi – Picante miso vegetables, takuan, shiso cress. Sticky but very good.

Nasu Miso – Aubergine miso, apricot, puffed soba, sesame seeds. Aubergine like I’ve never tasted it before. Again, a lot of great textures here and a ton of deep flavours.

King Oyster Mushroom Tostada – Pulled mushroom, smoked aji panca chilli, guacamole, lime, coriander. I’m not normally a mushroom fan, but this was smoky, “meaty” and satisfying.

Truffled Mushroom Rice – Sweet corn & queso fresco dip, jalapeño, coriander, corn tostadas. This was a rice heavy meal, and at this point I could eat no longer. I had about three spoonfuls and no more. It was a good dish, but it lacked the depth of flavour and the uniqueness of the rest of the dishes.

Milk Soft Serve Ice Cream with toasted almonds, chocolate sauce. It’s ice cream, it was good, but we had to rush to the theatre so we didn’t get to finish it. It wasn’t a particularly interesting desert though.

This is definitely a place that I’d return to for a special occasion.

We then went to see the classic musical, “The Producers”, and it was excellent. The cast was brilliant, and it’s a very good musical with some great (if disturbing) songs. Mel Brooks is a comedy genius, and this musical still packs a punch.

We also went to Spitalfields market, which meant that I could sketch this guy:

Sketch of a statue of a goat in Spitalfields market.

This was my very first sketch in the new Pith Kabosu sketchbook that I purchased at Cass Art. I debated whether to buy this sketchbook or not, as it had smooth, 200gsm paper and it opened flat, but I wasn’t sure it would work with watercolours. The great sellers at Cass Art told me it would, as they use it themselves, and they were right. It’s now my “daily driver” having replaced the Stillman and Birn pocket beta. The beta has thicker and more textured paper but the Pith Kabosu is slightly larger, has a more durable cover, and opens flat much better than the Stillman and Birn does. I later returned and purchased two more of these sketchbooks, they were so good.

I later sketched this seller in his stall, after purchasing an old set of folding rulers from his stall. I decided to paint him and the flag but left the rest of the stall as line drawings.

The Pith Kabosu is also cheaper than the Stillman and Birn and as it has smoother paper, works better for ink sketches and dry medium (pencils of various kinds, for example). It means that I’m more inclined to bring it out and make quick sketches in it, even if I don’t get to adding watercolour to them.

We then went to the second play at The Globe – Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. We arrived early so I sat in the Starbucks across the entrance and sketched the place:

I originally didn’t have time to add colour to this. I just bashed out this 5 minute sketch and then added watercolour later, from reference photos.

I later added colour to the sketch. In hindsight I would have gone for a looser sketch, but I was still unsure what this paper could and couldn’t do. The answer is – practically everything. Only very heavy washes make the page buckle.

This was a regular Shakespeare play, and so there was some set design. this is the stage:

And in the yard where the groundlings are you can see another bit of the stage that isn’t normally there, but was used to represent the beach and other locales in the play.

I enjoyed the play a lot, and would recommend seeing plays at the Globe if you can tolerate the extremely uncomfortable seats (yes, even with the cushions).

We went to the Cartier exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum. The exhibition is sold out, and it’s well considered, but we found it a bit dull compared to the Marie Antoinette exhibition at the same museum.

This is the Patiala necklace that was part of the exhibition. It was made by Jacques Cartier for the Maharaja of Nawanagar in 1928. He also made the Maharaja of Nawanagar’s necklace, later named the Jeanne Toussaint in the “Ocean’s 8” movie (it was a recreation made by Cartier for the movie).

My favourite parts were the film where they showed how a Cartier leopard is made, and the famous mystery clocks. There was a whole room dedicated to them, and it was fabulous.

Next post will be the last in the series. You can read it 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.

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:

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!

End of Summer Sea View Sketch

I started this one yesterday on location and then discovered that I needed a proper brush to finish it and not just a waterbrush, so I finished it at home today. The flowers are squills, which have a dreadful name in English but they are magnificent flowers and the heralds of autumn.

This was drawn using a very limited and somewhat unusual palette – the Roman Szmal Aquarius mini watercolour set for urban sketchers. I purchased it and the 50th anniversary special edition Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Lush set at the Urban Sketchers Poznan Symposium‘s art market. It was a real challenge to work with a set that didn’t include any of the colours that I’m used to using, and combine it with a medium (Neocolors II) that I’ve only used once or twice before. I like the results enough to challenge myself to create more of these in the future.

This is what was done on location:

Big Celebratory Birthday Update Part 1

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted a weekly update, and it’s my birthday week, so to celebrate I decided to write 43 points (split up to several posts to make them more manageable), in no practical order:

After a bit of drama I have managed to enrol to the 2025 Urban Sketchers’ Symposium in Poznan, Poland. I will be posting about my sketchbook and art supplies packing list later on, but do let me know in the comments if you’ll be there.
Rising tariffs and shipping costs have made online pen, ink and paper purchases prohibitively expensive for me. This may not be a bad thing, as it should encourage me to use the large stash of “stuff” that I already have.
I have been gifting people nice notebooks and pens lately, and it’s been a surprisingly heartwarming success. Giving people a notebook that matches their style and needs, coupled with a pen that suites them and an encouragement to start journaling about their lives has been one of the joys of my life in recent months.
Moleskine came out with a cool Peanuts collection of notebooks and Blackwing pencils (plus a backpack and set of pins). It’s refreshing to see them use the XL cahiers for a limited edition, as I don’t think they’ve done that since the Art collection about a decade ago.
Lightening Book Review #1 (I have a huge pile of books to review and not enough time to write a dedicated post for all of them): When the Moon Hits Your Eye, John Scalzi. Scalzi is normally very good at humorous sci-fi, but this book is not one of his successes. It’s an overtly silly, very lightweight book that is not on par with the other books he groups in this loosely thematic trilogy, The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain. It really suffers from the constant jumping around amongst a giant cast – the plot loses momentum, and you find it hard to connect to any set of characters. While it was not great hardship reading it and it’s a decent light read, feel free to skip this one and wait for the next instalment of his “Old Man’s War” series.
It’s OK to splurge and buy yourself flowers every once in a while, if you enjoy flowers.
I’ve started rucking, which is basically walking at a brisk pace outside with weight on your back. I use an Osprey hiking daypack weighed down mostly with water, but also with a giant cookbook, my journal and kindle, which brings it to around 10kg of weight. I take a break about 15 minutes into my session to sit outside and journal or meditate. If you’re curious, start with a bag that has a waist belt and not too much weight for too long, and skip the $400 overhyped specialized bags and weight plates.
Go see a play (not a musical or comedy) at your local theatre. It’s a great way to open yourself to new ideas and perspectives – especially those that you don’t agree with.
Lightening Book Review #2: Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus. I really wanted to like this book, but the combination of graphic, repetitive and unrelenting “period piece” misogyny and sexual assault coupled with a frankly unbelievable, non-relatable and largely unlikable heroine made it impossible. Couple this with an even less believable daughter and dog (though the dog is cute), lots of didactic and condescending lecturing that is so blatantly not period true and can at times be needlessly offensive (was the vegetarian bashing necessary?) and this was a book that I didn’t really enjoy. The cooking show, dog and rowing bits were nice, though.
Marvel’s Thunderbolts*/New Avengerts is a delightful, touching, thrilling and generally great movie. It’s well worth the cinema visit, and I plan to rewatch it once it lands on Disney+.
Please don’t do things just so that you can post about them on social media. That’s no way to live your life. It’s the equivalent of voluntarily turning yourself into one of the Matrix human batteries – for AI training models’ and advertisers' use.
Here’s a recent sketch that I did:

Have a great week and see you in part 2.

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