Super-fast Sketches on the Seine

Andy Walker
Jul 26, 2023
3 min read

I’m in Paris and cruising down the river Seine on what equates to a bus, but on water. This bus, called the Batobus, sails along a circular route, stopping briefly to let passengers on and off at 9 different tourist hotspots. It’s a great way to see the sights and to get around, avoiding the snarled up city traffic.

I am in a post-luncheon state of relaxation and I’m enjoying just looking around as the city drifts by, when my wife Donna says, “Why don’t you do a little sketch of each of the landing sites where the boat stops? I think that would be a lovely momento of our holiday here. There’s only nine of them”.

The Challenge

Now I like a good challenge, and as challenges go, this is a good one! So I say yes, and set up my watercolour sketching kit.

What I did not realise was how difficult this was going to be, or how much I was going to learn about capturing the essence of a scene during the short time that followed. The boat stops for only a couple of minutes, sometimes less, just to let passengers on or off, and then it heads down the river for about 10 minutes to the next stop. That gave me less than two minutes to choose a scene and sketch it with a pencil, and then remember colours and other details to paint in as the boat sailed away to its next destination, where the process was repeated. Nine times.

Here’s what I learned

Starting at Notre Dame, I was able to sketch the front facade and a crane that is involved in the restoration after the fires the boat was coming in to stop. This drawing took me 15 seconds, so while it may not be totally accurate it does have a sense of place.

At the Jardín de Plantes I saw these two large pots with small trees in them at the landing stage, with steps behind leading to the mass of trees and plants behind. This seemed to me to represent the area well and was all I could manage in the time. I was certainly having to edit heavily the scene before me to capture the essence of what it was about.

I couldn’t see anything of interest at the Hotel de Ville stop, apart from a church tower tucked away on the other side of the river. Things were even worse at the Louvre because it was completely obscured by trees, so I had to make do with the sign board announcing the fact that we were indeed at the Louvre.

I was finding that the quick sketch was making me edit all the time to pick only what was salient and useful, but that my visual memory was improving all the time. I began to spend less time drawing and more time looking and remembering, so that I could then draw from memory at a slightly more leisurely pace as the boat sailed to the next stop.

At the Place de la Concorde I attempted a golden winged horse on a stone pillar which proved to be an almost impossible task in two minutes…

The Eiffel Tower was hard! So much intricate ironwork! I did my best, although half-way through I realised I had missed a leg out entirely. I added some people in to give scale and to show how busy it was.

Three stops left which went by in a blur as there were now very few passengers getting on or off, so my two minutes had become less than one! At St. German des Pres there was nothing to see at all apart from this rubbish bin and a tree trunk, so I went for that.