margaret-cooter: Drawing Tuesday

On the way to the gallery, I spotted the engine of a V2 rocket, visible "in the round" -

Since struggling to draw it at the Imperial War Museum a while back, and again at the weekend, I was interested to get a different view of the pipes - but rather than stopping to draw it, proceeded to the gallery as planned.

Only to find this -

To get the angle (and to fit it on my page), I sat on the floor - and did lots of measuring, until it actually did fit on the page, with a little space to spare at the top, fortuitously as it turned out. Meanwhile a tour came round and I learned that this V2 rocket had been built after the war, by the British. Elsewhere it says it was one of eight engines built as part of Operation Backfire in late 1945, and came to the museum via Cranfield University. It has been standing upright since 2000.

Getting up to stretch, I went round the back and saw the bit that didn't fit under the ceiling -

and added it to the drawing -

The shadows helped with seeing the details, as did having brightness from the sunshine -

Using the camera helped with a better view, too -

As the tour guide said, if these bombs had been developed earlier in the war, there's not telling what would have happened - once launched, they were unstoppable. After the war, the V2s became the basis of the space race, their scientists and engineers relocating to the US and the factories being taken over by the Russians.

History aside, here are some of the day's drawings.