Sketching in Neal's Yard

After sketching at Seven Dials I walked down to Neal's Yard which is nearer Covent Garden. In fact it's about a couple of minute's walk from both Seven Dials and Covent Garden Tube Station.

Neal's Yard
8.5" x 11.5", pencil and coloured pencils
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

A small alley between Shorts Gardens and Monmouth Street opens into Neal's Yard, a small courtyard which is a slightly hippy home to healthy food (eg Neal's Yard Salad Bar and Neal's Yard Deli - which is the purple and orange building to the right of my sketch above); natural remedies (Neal's Yard Remedies) and other new age type shops - mixed in with beads and back rubs! As you can tell having Neal's Yard in the name has some cachet!

Trees in bins, Neal's Yard
11.5" x 8.5" , pencil and coloured pencils
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

The colours are a refreshing change - although trying to cope with quite so many complementary colours at one and the same time slightly overwhelms the eyes.

I sat at the Souk end and then went and sat on the bench outside Neal's Yard Remedies (on the left of the sketch at the top) and drew the view of from the other way on - of trees in coloured bins and the green seats which surround them - against the inevitable acid orange painted brick walls!

On the way out I paid a visit to Neal's Yard Dairy - to sniff the cheese - as I'm not allowing myself to eat cheese at the moment (diet!).

The top sketch didn't look right when I got home and I realised that in trying to work through the complexities of the pattern of horizontals and verticals PLUS all the local colours I'd completely lost the value pattern which had attracted me to the view in the first place. A little bit of attention with an eraser to pick out the lights and reinforcement of the darks with my pencil and my sketch was looking much more as it should do.

Sketchercise: there was a fair bit of trekking around - but sketching in central London doesn't rack up the distances as much as walking in parks and alongside canals and rivers!

However I made myself walk down through a very busy Covent Garden down to Embankment to catch the District Line tube home - which is where I paid a visit to the art section of the Waterstones book shop. I'm just about to sit and write the review of that for Making A Mark reviews......

[UPDATE and here it is Art Bookshop Review: Waterstones (Covent Garden) ]

Sketching at Seven Dials

Last Friday I was on a sketching trip to Seven Dials near Covent Garden.

It's a curious place. Initially you think of as being the place where there's a road junction of seven roads - with a great big Sundial Pillar (it has six sundials) in the centre. That's now a place where people like to take time out, and - as is the way of the world these days - check out their messages and text their friends on their iphones and mobiles! However Seven Dials is also a thriving community within central London - of which more below.

Networking at Seven Dials
pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils in panoramic sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

This sketch was actually done in my panoramic sketchbook and the pillar continues up the page. However I quite liked this crop when I did the scan so that's what you can see!

I'm currently mulling over making this into a proper drawing for an exhibition next year.

About Seven Dials

Seven Dials - the area around the junction - was once a notorious place. I first came across it in Agatha Christie's novel The Seven Dials Mystery (1929).

Seven Dials was orginally created by Thomas Neale MP and was planned as a fairly up-market development. The design of the Seven Dials development - the seven roads fanning out from the central pillar was ingenious and addressed the nature of the site layout and the financial commitments which went with it. As a result there are several passages and small court yards in the surrounding streets.

Initially the residents were respectable, if not aristocratic, comprising of gentlemen, lawyers and prosperous tradesmen. However after Neale disposed of his finanical interest in the development in 1695, the rest of it was carried out by various builders over the next 15 years. They sub-divided the houses which in turn led to a very different sort of inhabitant from that originally planned!

by the middle of the 18th century, the area had 'declined' to the extent that 39 night-watchmen were needed to keep the peace. By the early 19th century the area became famous, together with St. Giles to the north, as the most notorious rookery (slum) in London.
The Seven Dials Trust

Map of the present day Seven Dials
available to download

Latterly a lot of money has been spent on regenerating the area. It became designated as an Outstanding Conservation Area (only 36 existed out of 6,000 in the UK) and then gained Housing Action Area status in 1977. This brought back into use every vacant residential property and also encouraged major private housing schemes and new businesses.

The replacement sundial column seen today was constructed in 1988 and 1989, to the original design.

Candy Cakes, 36 Monmouth Street
- just off Seven Dials

It's now a sustainable community, has good shops and is a very trendy area!

Links:

• The Seven Dials Trust
• Wikipedia - Seven Dials
• Information about the Seven Dials Shopping Area
  

How to create a Google map for sketches and sketchercise

Members of Sketchercise have recently been learning how to produce maps of our routes using Google Maps - so that we can see the places where sketches are being done on our travels with a sketchbook.

I included my first one in my last post about Hampstead Heath and the Boating Pond

Now - so that I don't forget how to do it and also so I can make a record of my tips for myself I'm sharing what I do to create a map. I think I was successful on my third attempt - hence the tips section!

How to create a Google Map of your sketching trip

If you want to include maps of your route on sketching trips in your blog posts this is what you need to do:

• find Google Maps - it's usually a link in the top left of the Google Home Page.
  
• If you're creating a map for a foreign country, go to the Google Map for that country eg "Google France" and then click the maps link
  
• You can create maps in the My Maps section
  
• Here's the Google Help Page for how you get started with creating your own map
  
• Watch this Google video tutorial about how to create maps on Google Maps. This explains about creating a new map and including placemarks and lines for your route.
  

Two ways to create a map of your sketches

There are essentially two alternative ways of creating a map:

• a map of a route taken - with placemarks for sketches en route (and/or local landmarks and/or places you'd like to sketch - as a reminder!)
• a map of placemarks

A map of a route taken with placemarks for sketches

This was the option I chose for my (unlisted) first map of Hampstead Heath Walk #1 - The Boating Pond

The huge benefit for sketchercisers is that it tells you how far you've walked at the end of the route!

A map of placemarks for sketches

An alternative to creating a route is to create a map of placemarks which link to sketches you've done from that spot

Martin Stankewitz (Edition Handdruck) has created a (public) map like this for his walks in his local forest which he features in Wandern und Zeichnen. See Waldtagebuch Forest diary . Click a placemark and you can see the sketch

His images in Picasa are public and hence can be located on the map.

(Note you can translate the text on Martin's blogs by clicking the translate link at the top of the right column on the home page)

Some tips for creating Google Maps

• What's the map about - Use the title and description to say what the route is about if you want to be able to keep your chums aware of where you have been walking and sketching.
  
• Use the right line tool - If you're going to be walking across open land you can't use the 'draw a line along roads'!
• Don't give up! - I found it quite difficult to get the 'draw a line' tool to start. Persevere - you'll get there in the end.
  
• Achieving accuracy Tip #1 - Work in the satellite view with names of roads and landmarks switched on. It's much, much easier to get the route right that way
  
• Achieving accuracy Tip #2 - Magnify the map as much as you can while you're inserting placemarks and the route you walk. Otherwise you'll find as I did that all the placemarks and the route lines are in the wrong place when you do look more closely
• Achieving accuracy Tip #3 - Use lots of clicks for the 'drawing a line' tool for the route that helps get its 'shape' right. I started to find it was useful to click every time the route started to bend in shape.
• Show where you did the sketch - I use placemarks to note where I did a sketch. I then use the rich text of description to include a link to my blog post. Obviously the description also gives scope to indicate which direction you were looking in, what the weather was like etc and/or how long you stayed.
• Concise descriptions - The description in the placemark list only shows the first line - so you need to be fairly precise with the words used in that line, for example "This is where I did my sketch of..."
  
• Public or unlisted? - You have a choice about whether you make your map public - or only available to those which have its URL (ie it's not listed by Google). I'm sticking to the latter.
• Privacy - One important thing to bear in mind. If you don't want to share your address on the Internet do what I do and use a fixed point near your home to act as a start and end point. I'll also be varying mine!

I'm going to be coming back and updating this post as I find out new tricks!

What are your tips for creating a Google Map of where you've been sketching?