Sketches...

No pretty pastel paintings for the next day or so. 
I am writing my history for my grandchildren.
Actually I have written it.

It will be illustrated.
These are quick preliminary pencil sketches.
I was going to intersperse the written word with various little pen sketches. 
But as I was starting this morning, I realised it would be simpler and easier for me, to have wider margins on the A4 sheets of paper, and do these drawings in portrait mode to go down either side.
They will be drawn in ink (I think), with one splash of colour that is the emotion that goes with each one. 
You are probably wondering at the first one. A tent.
I was seriously ill when I was born, not breathing, and I spent my first few weeks in an oxygen tent. 
My mother told me that when I was about 10. And when she told me (that was all the detail she gave me on it), I saw in my mind that my mother had deserted me when I was born, and that I was left in an army tent on the top of a windy hill. (There was an army camp at the end of our road, and my only knowledge of tents was an army tent.)
It was many years later before I discovered what an oxygen tent was. And I can still feel now that emotion and abandonment I felt at 10 years old.

The man playing tennis? When my father was on his deathbed, he admitted he was playing an important competition tennis match when I was being born...and my stepmother was horrified when she heard that and berated him. Funny things deathbeds...confession time...

I have probably about a hundred of these little sketches to plan out. So I will be going out to the potting shed when the day warms up, and trying out these pencil sketches.

Now, I feel like a cooked breakfast...

Make the most of today, if you can.

Time for another coffee as well.




No hidden Popeye here, he is just on the text symbols after the date.
So you can have a reprieve from searching for him the next few days.