Sketching in Edinburgh

It's been a week of sketching (with a few days of work in between). On Monday I had my drawing group in Musselburgh and did a few sketches of the model, along these lines.

Monday night sketch copyright Aileen Grant

Today has been a particularly a good day's sketching in town with pals. We started off in the recently re-opened Royal Scottish Museum (http://www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/national_museum.aspx ).  The Museum does look great now that it has opened again.  I miss the fish in the main hall, and I'm sorry about the clock being moved into a side gallery, but the main gallery looks very elegant and quite lovely.  It was really just a little too lovely, on too grand a scale, and distracting, difficult to sketch.  However, I did one little sketch of this - a view from the ground floor.

Museum View Sketch copyright Aileen Grant

I quite like the looseness of this sketch, and it was important to capture the image of that lady in between the arches.  The fact that the sketch is not too recognisable as the museum - there's an ambiguity - it could be a number of places  - is quite good and I like this about it. That feeling of ambiguity is probably less apparent in this sketch (done at first floor balcony level) which is (probabaly recognisably) a sketch of St Giles' steeple.

Sketch of St Giles through the window copyright Aileen Grant

  But I quite like this too. I think both of these sketches have some potential to explore. Anyway, after some time sketching we went for lunch across the road.  And I was very struck by my view in the restaurant. I managed to focus on the food and enjoy my lunch, but I couldn't resist doing a very very quick sketch just  before we left.

Sketch - lunch looking over the Old Town copyright Aileen Grant

The reality is much darker than this sketch, but I have a photo that I can use to help me get the depth of colour and darkness, should I choose to take this further.  And I just think that I might as I think this has potential as an interesting  picture.  I've already done another sketch, and it's inspiring me to think of a theme of window views.  Anyway, we went on to Greyfriars churchyard and did some more sketching - very inspiring - but that's another story. What a lovely city Edinburgh is - it's always good to be reminded of this!