Yawns, epic struggles and contemplations

I have been so unproductive on the drawing front lately! Here are a few recent sketches from sculptures in the V&A Museum and Saatchi Gallery.

A pile of clothes on a pile of chairs at the life drawing (minus model!) session this afternoon at the EFL school where I work. The teacher did a nice introduction on contrast, cross-hatching, foreshortening etc, then got the students started drawing the lovely still life composition above. Everyone seemed to be getting on well, we had a nice mix of nationalities, the teacher was moving about giving the usual encouraging comments, then he got to one girl and said "Hmmm, Ok, well, it's always open to interpretation..." I wondered ooh what abstract thing will she have done? Turns out she was just drawing a picture of her cat. The instructions must have got lost in translation...

Hanging out

I paid another trip recently to Nunhead Cemetery, a beautifully overgrown Victorian cemetery full of cracked, uneven gravestones and the odd angel. These are a couple of pen and watercolour sketches I did there.

The garden series: part 2

Well, yard more than garden, to be accurate. The deformed dartboard has deformed further since I started doing this one! The ring with the numbers on it is now hanging below the dartboard! There are no longer two darts, but one, and that one has lost its point so is basically no longer a dart! To add further woe, the hammock I was doing this drawing from is on its last legs (moth victim?) and can only be used if you're able to distribute your weight completely evenly while getting into it (i.e. never!)

The garden series: part 1

The upper patio in the beautiful garden at my parents' house with plants, birds and sleeping cats a-plenty... part 2 will be an almost-finished sketch of the back yard in my house with its clothes lines and deformed dartboard, as soon as it stops raining for long enough for me to finish!

pen put to paper at last!

Speed-sketch of north-bound platform at Forest Hill Station.

On yer bike!

So, it was tuesday evening and I had an hour to kill round Victoria way after work, and I headed out to find somewhere for a nice (decaf) coffee and some sketching. After proving WRONG the theory that in London you're never more than 6 metres from a Cafe Nero, I decided to settle for Starbucks only to discover it was a miniscule one with NO COMFY SEATS! Booo! Then I spied some wicker chairs and tables out the back, so taking my vanilla ("not too much syrup it can be a bit too sweet") latte with me and ignoring the voice in my head saying "Er you've got a horrible cold and sore throat, stay inside!!" I sat myself down, looked up and saw I had a perfect view of Westminster Cathedral. And... decided the viewpoint was a bit too difficult, so drew this lovely Boris Bike instead. Of course, it hadn't occurred to me that somebody might actually want to hire a hire bike, so there were a few hairy moments when people came over, fiddled about with keys and cards and things and I immediately speeded up my sketching, but fortunately it seemed there was something wrong with it so my subject was left be for me to finish. Result! And by the way, the left handlebar is higher than the right one in real life, not just my measurements gone wrong. No idea why.