It's springtime in London

Yes, that's where we are, and we couldn't have asked for better weather -- it's been hovering around 70 degrees here. So -- no excuse not to get the sketchbooks out! Yesterday I walked practically the length and breadth of the city, looking in at various shops like Green & Stone and L. Cornelissen for art supplies; Finnesse Lifestyle for the Aarika 'Foxi' earrings that I'd bought in Helsinki and promptly lost; Foyle's for some of the travel sketchbooking art books I wanted, etc. So the only two sketches I did were these, at the beginning of the day, both at Duke of York Square on King's Road. (I don't have a scanner with me, so obviously these are only as good as I can make them with a digital camera and Photoshop.)































Today, I decided to do the opposite -- I went to fewer places and got more sketching in. Here's the scene at a cafe on Earl's Court Road where we had breakfast:
















Went out to Smithfield Market after that, and did a quick sketch while I was waiting for an appointment that never actually happened:























After a picnic lunch in the hotel room from M&S Simply Food, took the tube out to Kew Gardens:
























































I brought along this Muji notebook to experiment with -- I don't know that it's meant for drawing at all, but it has lovely brown kraft paper and so far I really like the way it works with a gray Pitt Artist pen and a gel-ink white pen. I sketched the above while in the gardens, and decided to add a little color with my Stabilo color pens later on:























Finally, I did a quick impression of people at a small cafe in Kew, near the railway station.