Drawing Tuesday at the National Maritime Museum

It's been a while since I've been drawing with the Tuesday gang in museums  because of  travelling up for the British Museum 'Drawing from Collections'. That course being over it was good to reconnect, the venue today being the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I haven't visited since the 'Turner and the Sea 'exhibition - travelling from Faversham  changing trains at Gillingham and Woolwich was a bit more of an adventure but actually quite  straightforward as I avoided central London.  It was good to see the  '4th plinth' ship in the bottle with its sails of African fabrics  and I was mesmerised by the sea projection in the 'Voyagers' gallery.

 However, having arrived late I was eager to get stuck into some drawing, what to choose??

 I loved the figureheads which both Margaret and Joyce were drawing  from different angles. But in the end I headed back to the Voyagers gallery as they had some interesting items in the cases , not  too badly lit and relatively quiet.

 My grandfather  on my dad's side was a pattern-maker on the Glasgow shipyards (including the Queen Mary)  before he became a gardener, a love of working with wood he passed on to   Dad.

 As I've been doing a lot of hand stitching at the moment ( and know the importance of thimbles , my favourite is the ' comfort'), I was fascinated by the sailmakers tools - the reamer for  flat seams(7)  but particularly the 'roping palm' (5) .

It proved surprisingly difficult to draw correctly ( I should have stuck with 1 drawing rather than multiple versions). What I really wanted to do was to have it on my hand  and feel how it worked!