Previous Sketchbooks (4)

Tunisia 2000. I'd just turned 60 at the time and I was given the holiday of a lifetime to celebrate.A tour of the country and some time in the desert. Within that fortnight I filled a whole sketchbook doing speed drawings whilst on the move on various means of transport from a coach to a Land Rover and even the back of a camel. Many of the drawings were rather rough because of the uneven movements of our transports across variable terrain. This group of  drawings are more finished as we had stopped at the particular venue so I could take my time and with a coffee to hand..... need I say more?
The first one in monochrome is done in water soluble pencil. The other three are pen and watercolour wash.

A corridor in a Roman Amphitheatre at El_Jem on the North-East coast. The Roman Remains here are remarkably well preserved, probably because of the dry climate and perhaps a lot of it may have spent a large part of the last two millennia buried under the sands of the Sahara.Who knows? Its quite unlike the Roman remains found here on this cold, windswept and wet island of Britain.
On many of these sketchbook pages I wrote down where I was at the time so some will hardly need further explanation.

 Douga lies in the far north of Tunisia, well out of the desert area. There's a whole Roman town here. It only needs the woodwork replacing.

  A Belly Dancer who obligingly performed her routine staying on one part of the floor just long enough for me to get the information down on paper.

Carthage. The Romans were not best pleased with Hannibal giving them a drubbing so they crossed the Mediterranean and demolished the Carthaginian town.There's quite a bit more to the story than that but even the ruins show that these North African people were no mean builders.