Sketchcrawl #18

The eighteenth International Sketchcrawl (www.sketchcrawl.com) was last Saturday. I'm happy to report that attendance was up by 50%! Yes, this time there were three of us.

Thanks to Chris and Alfonso who showed up. It was a full day of sketching, and as usual I felt that I walked too much and drew too little. The fact is that every location has something to offer, if you are open to it. Here are the results, starting with a little gouache study which I created while waiting to begin:



Rainy day tourists at the Tower of London:


Trafalgar Square and "Nando's" restaurant:


Tate Modern and Southwark Cathedral:

Things I might have seen in London, part 9

Here are a few more sketches. Sorry about the delay.

The locations of each of these, clockwise from the upper left, are: St Katharine's Wharf, St. Mary Abbott's churchyard, Berkeley Square, the Gherkin building, Euston station, King's Cross station, Bloomsbury at Prince's street, and finally the Olympia Exhibition Center.

Things I might have seen in London, part 8

The pace is picking up at work, and I have less time to sketch than before. Still, I managed to squeeze out a few.

Things I might have seen in London, part 7

I like using grids as a way of imposing discipline on my approach to drawing. There are a number of ways to use grids. In this case, I drew a grid in light pencil on a sketchbook page. I then made it a goal to fill that grid with tonal studies by the end of the day as I wandered around. The fact that each composition was a fixed rectangle helped to eliminate another decision from the process. Restrictions like this make it easier for me to focus my efforts.



There are other ways to use grids. Thumbnail sketches work really well in a grid format. Here's a "bus sketching" session:



When sketching from the imagination rather than from life, using a closely spaced grid can stimulate creative thinking. Allowing lines from one grid box to flow into the next permits an uninterrupted flow of ideas. Not all of these thumbnails will be useful, but in this approach quantity comes first. Discerning the best image becomes a process of elimination.

Things I might have seen in London, part 6

Floppycabs. Floppy but evil!

A church, too. Nice to see that an old church still knows how to get funky.

Things I might have seen in London, part 5

A view of London from the hill behind the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. This is where the Royal Greenwich Observatory and the prime meridian are located. Also on this page, an interesting house in Earls Court and a view of the front of the Natural History museum.

Things I might have seen in London, part 4

Some buildings...