A sorrowful word of advice to all

If you ARE going to work from a photograph, thinking - oh so foolishly - that your memory will fill in the bits that the photograph shows but poorly, I do commend you to think again.   You see, I thought that.  How difficult, I asked myself blithely, can it be?   Well I've found out.   Of course, I have excuses: I always have excuses, given time to make them up.  I can no longer climb the path on the Downs giving access to the structure I wished to draw.  (I'll take sympathy, but would rather have a flask of brandy.)  But I used another's photo; a man whose photographic skills are slight; crucial details of quite a complex structure, with buttresses all over the place and apparently strewn hither and yon, were not obvious.   Anyway, profit by my error: if the original from which you're working is, to coin a phrase, deeply duff, the same is very likely to be true of your effort.  I may post it ... not on the Gallery, obviously, but as a warning to the unwary, the groundlessly optimistic, the naive.   If only I'd got an able-bodied friend to assist me up there, I'd have drawn it on the spot and taken my own photo.  But I didn't.   Happily, I made another drawing which worked hugely more satisfactorily - well, perhaps two, I need to put it away for a day and take another peek later.  But it's your failures, isn't it?   You have a success, two successes, even three - one entire lash-up, though, and it's that you remember and on which you obsess.  Or is it only me?