funny how a rough sketch or study can send you hurtling back to the precise moment of creation …

… sitting in the hot Venice sunshine on marble steps by a bridge, or a church, usually in the quieter, humbler ‘sestieres’ of Cannaregio or Castello.

I remember this while sketching … an old woman shaking a rug out of her window on the third floor stopped to smile and wave to me. In a city inundated with tourists (267 to every Venetian), I appreciated that friendly gesture.

I took ink-stained tissue paper and pva glue with me this time as part of my sketching kit. It seems to capture the intense colour and light of the city … a bit fiddly but lovely to sketch over, and in the heat it dried quickly.

The long narrow sketch pad you can see in some of the photos is the ‘Extreme’ watercolour pad produced by RE+new Gallery in Woodbridge, Suffolk. It’s very useful for panoramas (or tall buildings) and great for pen or pencil and wash; but I tend to work in a fairly wet style and I find the paper a bit thin for that, unfortunately. The other sketchbook is a good old small, square Seawhite sketchbook, which seems to take well to wet-in-wet, collating etc.

Okay, end of technical details …