Fleshing up some bare bones

... is how I think of going through some of the more promising pages of my sketchbook with a pen, a big brush and some watercolour sloshings.
It concentrates the mind amazingly to sharpen up some jottings and re-read some reminders.

Some of them were just a few reminder type lines dashed down in the train or bus. Trains, however, are so much more sketchbook friendly than the upstairs of a big red bus. Tubes are to be avoided at all cost except absolute necessity as far as I'm concerned.





 The horse was spotted from the train from Victoria to Chichester, somewhere in Surrey, forlorn on a dazzling carpet of fallen autumn leaves.
Before the snows.


The black-clad women, trailing inches of cloth through the dust, I spied from the top of a bus as we waited at traffic lights near Marble Arch.

I'm waking up to dead silence now (the birds don't get going til sunup which is sooooo late at the moment) and must say, though most will think me mad, I am almost missing hearing the traffic roaring down Kilburn High Road and snatches of conversation as people make their way to work.

To say nothing of the somewhat louder sounds of humanity coming from the North London Tavern at night - particularly memorable were the raucous snatches of Delilah by some merry soul on a pre-Christmas roll one evening.

I daresay I'll acclimatize sooner or later.