Following the lines

One of Edinburgh’s curved streets caught my eye this week.

Seeing the lines on Jeffrey Street.

Jeffrey Street leads up and round from the back of Waverley Station on Market Street up to the High Street and then dropping down to St Mary’s Street beyond. It’s an area I know well as I worked for many years at the bottom of the High Street with the Scotsman Newspaper. I would often use Jeffrey Street as a link between the old and new towns of the city.

Little did I know then I would be selling my sketched merchandise in a cafe on that same street and I feel very grateful to the staff at Hot Toddy who now sell a range of local artists work in their wonderfully calm space which is full of house plants. They also run super whisky tasting sessions in their beautiful cocktail a whisky lounge.

This sketch shows the curved lines of the drain pipes and window sills which often come together to make guide lines which I use to get started on my sketch. It is one of the tips I use on my sketching workshops where I give several ways in which you can get started and make an at first busy and detailed view seem more simple and straight forward.

I have a workshop coming up on the 29th in the New Town where we will be looking at perspective in Georgian buildings and also adding people to give scale in your drawings. We will walk up to St Andrews Square as we create a number of quick sketches in ink and watercolour before heading back to a warm base for a cuppa and to finish our paintings. In the video below you will see I added the watercolour wash for Jeffrey Street once back in the warmth.

Find out more about my Sunday morning workshop below.

Sketches from a previous New Town workshop.