14) Hungary - One Day in Budapest - Other Pictures

St. Matyas Church, Buda

 Yes, this is one of the pictures that I finished off in the evening back at the hotel. It was taking ages, it was cold, and time was getting on. It's a stunning looking church, high on the same hill that houses the Castle.

Chain Bridge, from Pest side of the Danube

 My first attempt to sketch the Chain Bridge. It just doesn't work because of that crenelated tower in front of it.

St. Matyas Church and the Fishermens Bastion, Buda

 My first sketch of part of the Matyas Church, and the Fisherman's bastion beside it, which is a great place to look down and out across the river and the rest of the city.

Budapest Parliament Building - Buda - from Danube

This is the other sketch I finished off in the hotel. I made a very quick outline sketch on the boat, but most of the work was done from the photograph.

12) Germany - Berlin - Other sketches - late August 2017

Domkirche - Berlin Cathedral

 This is the Domkirche - the late baroque masterpiece which houses the tombs of the Hohenzollern Kings of Prussia and Kaisers of the German Empire. I sketched it from the side of the Spree.

Marienkirche - St. Mary's Church

The Marienkirche is one of the oldest churches in East Central Berlin, and it's not without its own beauty.  It sits to the side of a square, at the end of which is the Rathus, or town hall, behind a very ornate fountain.

Brandenburg Gate

 An iconic image of Berlin. Its so easy now to cross from East to West Berlin that it's difficult to visualise that this place was the symbol of the Cold War once upon a time.

Mozart - Haydn - Beethoven Memorial - Tiergarten

 If you walk west through the Brandenburg Gate, and keep walking, you'll eventually come to the Siegsaule - pictured below. The thing is, though, that the Siegsaule is so tall, that you think it's a lot closer than it is. I was, after walking from the Brandenburg Gate to the Siegsaule, knackered. Even after resting to make the sketch, I was soon knackered walking back. This time though I walked through the Tiergarten, the park which runs alongside the road. I found this charming memorial to three great composers, and sat down on a bench beside it and made this sketch to give me a bit more recovery time.

Altes Museum - Museum Island

 Back to Museum Island. I was waiting for the airport bus and made this sketch while I did so. A group of passers by liked it, and the little Italian guy who was selling ice creams by the side of the road even asked me if he could take a photo of it. He didn't give me a free ice cream, though.

Berlin Rathaus

 This is the aforementioned Rathaus. It's not a great sketch this, although to be fair the scanner does seem to have exaggerated the slight sland to the tower which my sketch had (the original building is as straight as a dye, I hasten to add) I was intrigued because to me this looks very like a German cousin of the contemporary Cardiff Pierhead building. Did the architect have a bike?

Siegsaule - West Berlin

The Siegsaule. Literally the Victory column, which was built to commemorate the Prussian victories over Denmark, Austria and then France in the second half of the 19th century, which led to the unification of Germany in 1871.

9) Spain - ALicante area - early August 2017

San Isidro Church nr. Alicante

 My mother in law, and my wife's stepfather live in a wee village called San Isidro, about 15/20 minutes outside Alicante on the Costa Blanca. The village itself was a new construct in the 1950s, and this modernist church dates from 1956. I'm not the greatest fan of modernism myself, but this building is clean and unfussy, and has a certain elegance. One thing I found about being in Spain was that the brightness of the light was an encouragement to be more adventurous with line and wash watercolour.

Backstreet roof garden San Isidro nr. Alicante

 I just liked this back street roof garden.

Former San Isidro Station platform shelter - San Isidro nr. Alicante

 Now, when they rebuilt San Isidro - Catral - Albatera station a few years ago, they did a very clever and rather wonderful thing. They took this, the back wall of the station and the canopy over the platform, and transplanted it in another street to provide a rather lovely public performance space. Bravo.

La Cerveceria - San Isidro - nr. Alicante

 This is the Cerveceria - a restaurant which hosted my mother in law's birthday party, while the painting below shows her house and smart car.

San Isidro Street - nr. Alicante

3) Wales - Cardiff - Pierhead Building - September 2016

Cardiff - Pierhead Building

I did think for a bit about whether I could reasonably include British cities. But what the hell - I made this in pretty much exactly the same way that I made the Belgium sketches - with the exception that I'd discovered sketching pens by this time. And we are part of Europe - Brexit notwithstanding. For what it's worth I am a confirmed remainer - as they say, don't get me started.

The Pierhead Building is a beautifully iconic redbrick masterpiece, originally built right at the end of the 19th century as headquarters for the Bute Dock Company. It now belongs to the National Assembly of Wales.

While sketching this I was approached by just the one couple, who turned out to be Canadian. I think they were a little disappointed that I couldn't tell them a huge amount about the building, although they were at least quite complimentary about the sketch.

1) Ieper, Belgium, August 2016: The Cloth Hall

So, as I said, the first time I made open air sketches of buildings in a European city was before my diagnosis.

Over 10 years ago I started researching my family history. All I knew about him was that he was killed in World War I. After some fairly tricky research I found out that he had been killed on the first day of the 3rd Battle of Ypres in 1917, and that although his name was originally inscribed upon the Menin Gate, his body was subsequently found, and buried in a small war cemetery in a suburb of the town. I planned for years to visit the grave, but did nothing about it.

Then, in Easter 2016, my daughter Jenn had an interview for maternity cover with Thomson's travel agents, and did so well in the interview she was offered a permanent position. Thomsons - now Tui - seem to be a fantastic company to work for, and Jenn has done brilliantly. In 2017 she has been nominated as Travel Agent of the Year. Jenn organised my family to buy me a return flight to Brussels, a hire car, and a hotel room in Ieper in August 2016 so that I could fulfil my ambition of visiting the grave.

While in Ieper itself, I made three sketches. Firstly, this: -

Ypres Cloth Hall - 2016

Now, the problem with this sketch is that it's in pencil. I've since found that I much prefer using sketching pens. I made it while sitting in a café forecourt about 50 years away from the Cloth Hall, and I had the lovely experience of passers by coming up for a look at it, and a chat.

The Cloth Hall is a remarkable building. Would you believe it was actually opened during my lifetime? Well, this is a complete rebuild of the original building, after the identical medieval building on the same site was destroyed during World War I, and it wasn't opened until 1967. You'd never know. It houses the In Flanders Fields Museum, and so I've been inside and out, and it seems absolutely authentic.

I fell in love with the ornate sculpture of the facades and sides of the building, and made a biro sketch of some of the detail: -

Cloth Hall Facade

This convinced me that biro is not a great medium to use. The ink doesn't always flow freely, and the ballpoint tip can dig into the paper of a good sketch book.