Sketching People On The Tube

Hi! This weekend the London Urban Sketchers celebrated their 10 year anniversary with a bunch of workshops and sketch crawls. I went on a tube crawl facilitated by Adebanji Alade whose work I was familiar with from books, taking the Piccadilly line from King's Cross to Heathrow and back, sketching passengers during the ride. Adebanji has an infective enthusiasm and everyone had lots of fun during the afternoon.

I'm extremely happy with my sketches from today. I haven't done much drawing in the previous month and once again I'm finding that a break of a few weeks helped me break through a plateau. I don't know if this will keep working (or why it works) but taking time off seems to help with progressing. For the first time at an event like this, I noticed that I wasn't the most inexperienced artist anymore.

A moment that stood out in particular was Adebanji immediately recognising the sketches of his kids, himself and a fellow sketcher I'd made. I've found lately that my faces are getting less alien-like with proportions generally correct but I still often struggle capturing a likeness. I'll draw a face that looks like a face but not the face of the person I'm trying to draw. Getting closer to being able to draw the particular face in front of me feels very rewarding.

I used the same promarker pens I blogged about recently which have helped me a lot in focusing on value over line. Since they are alcohol based, they bleed through the paper onto the reverse side of the page. Several people today were using Tombow wash pens that did not have this problem. I'm in Shoreditch tomorrow and I'll see if Great Art has them in stock.

I also went to another event yesterday at the Tate Modern but I wasn't feeling so well so I left early. The sketch on the left had lots of trees in front of the museum. I struggle drawing trees a lot so now that I'm getting more comfortable with faces, maybe it's time to focus on vegetation next.