Looking back: 11 September 2010

I returned to Homerton today and before I got on the train to travel one stop to Hackney Central I took the opportunity to look back towards Hackney Wick.

From where I was sitting the view looked oddly rural which is an illusion since London is entirely man-made and generally very built up. But then again London is just a very large collection of towns and villages that have merged over the years so it's not really that suprising when a glimpse of a rural scene pops up. I wonder how many more I will see on this journey.

I chose to use a dip pen for this drawing. I haven't used one of these for years and I really love the wonky lines, scratches in the paper and the very prominent blob of ink in the foreground. It's tricky working out how much ink to leave in the reservoir and this is what can happen when there's too much!

The last time I was at Homerton I had to work with the thumping noise of a construction site going on in the background. This time, being the weekend, it was blessedly quiet and all I could hear were ordinary domestic sounds overlaid with some jazz music coming from one of the flats near the station. Lovely.