Mersea Beach ~ Daily Sketch 12/01/2014

Ten minutes sketch with gloved hands

As you can see from my hasty, wobbly pencil offering today I went to the beach. It is the first time i've walked along the beach for some time and although the sky was beautifully clear and the sun was bright the wind was nipping at my fingers. However I resolved to make a sketch but kept it brief with a few notes, simply in pencil, my gloves stayed on for the ten minutes it took.

This particular stretch of the shore is mostly shingle and shells at the water line giving way to finer sand higher up by the beach huts. As is often the case I picked up one or two shells for further reference and to accompany the many others that grace the window sill of my studio.

The few shells that made it home

As it has been quite a while since the last one, I'm now pondering another bigger studio painting of the huts and the beach/foreshore which will be an amalgamation of various sketches, photo's and found bits. 

Breakwater & Shells ~ Daily Sketch 10/05/2013

Shells From The Beach

I'm just back from the beach where I have been collecting some shells and doing a little drawing in the bitter early March wind. The beach here at West Mersea is completely littered with oysters of the Pacific/Gigas variety these days, totally out numbering our native, so I brought some home with me along with mussels, winkles, limpets and some very tiny, pretty whelk-like shells, in order to do some more detailed studies for some larger work I have been planning for some time. The wind seemed to be coming directly off the North Sea and up the River Blackwater, so with eyes streaming and shaky hands, 10 minutes was my limit for each sketch. But I feel totally invigorated now I'm home perusing my finds with coffee in hand and stove alight.

TBTE29.04.09

My stroll along the beach this evening revealed this latest act of vandalism/arson on several beach huts, with the firemen still damping things down. This is becoming a serious problem here on the island and to state the obvious I don't understant it. Beach huts are essentially such benign pieces of architecture after all and don't seem to me to be an obvious target for vandalism, compared to say, local authority property, but then I'm not a vandal. Perhaps if the people who did this are found they'll be made to build and paint new ones for their victims...now there's a thought, a beach maintenance working party as a sort of rehab. for vandals (with no ice creams!).