Yesterday I took myself out for an Artist Date (Julia Cameron), it’s been long overdue, 2+ years overdue but I had a rare opening in my schedule that meant I was a completely free agent. The sun was shining like it knew May was about to start so I booked a ticket for the British Museum and packed my drawing bag.
The drawing bag contained: x1 A5 Moleskine Sketchbook, small zoom camera, a selection of mechanical pencils (none of which I used), a Japanese brush pen, a yellow fine liner (?), a kuretake fudegochi brush pen, a Muji gel pen AND a selection of colour pencils - these were the weapons of choice for the day.
Part of the upkeep of a professional practice in illustration is to regularly maintain and improve skills and expertise in image making and one aspect I have been meaning to spend more time on is observation drawing on location.
I’ve never had a strong focus on people within my work, in the past I’ve mainly concentrated on our relationship with our environment and animals. In fact I would often say that it was because I wasn’t overly interested in people within my work, which for the most part was very true - I enjoyed my subject matter immensely and didn’t feel the need to bring people into compositions just to tick a box. However, over many years I began to realise I was avoiding drawing people because in all honesty I wasn’t very good at it! But I wasn’t any good at it because I never did it… you can see perhaps here where the vicious cycle might perpetuate itself.
So, over the past year I have been on and off, practicing drawing people, trying to find my hand and my head with them. My drawings of people are a little like my handwriting which can change almost mid sentence, so it is indeed a work in progress but progress I am making. Much of my teaching with 1st year illustration students is based around an idea of practice and how fundamental it is to their developing visual language and their confidence in their own ability to make pictures.
I have a collection of drawings made from the visit, the first three are the ones I created on location. I started drawing a static object while on location, this was to help get me warmed up with looking and drawing before I moved on to the people sketching. I chose colour pencils to work with as I have a tendency to go for detail and precision when working with pen and location drawing, I believe, is something that requires a different skill. It’s not so much for me about an accurate rendering of what you see but trying to capture a moment in time. Once I had warmed up with the neolithic stones in the Stonehenge Exhibition I focused my attention onto the people that would stop and read the information board in front of the stones. This is one of the great things about people drawing in a museum, they tend to stop very still for a moment to read the information - not very long but long enough to set a quick drawing challenge.
The second image is a page of quick studies of people in room 24, no-one stands for very long in this room, I think out of excitement, for many people it’s one of the first rooms you enter when you visit the museum so there is a real buzz in the air. It’s joyful to watch people trying to figure out what part they want to see first, listening to the excited chatter and the unfolding of the maps. It was at this point I decided to take some reference photographs of people looking at the museum artefacts to draw from later.
The last drawing I did before I left the Museum was the statue of a youth on horseback in the main court. It was here that I began to notice how lively and warm this space was, there was something really uplifting in seeing groups and individuals meeting up, old friends, new friends, groups of friends, first dates, anniversaries… this is a place for people to get together and feel connected.
Back home, I took a cuppa green tea back to my desk and uploaded my photographs onto my computer so I could draw from them from a bigger screen. I continued to focus on ‘people looking at things’ and this time used a new water soluble graphite pencil that had just been delivered. The next series of drawings were generated over a few hours, still following a quick sketching method, trying to keep it loose to capture shape and form.
I guess at this point I think it’s fair to say I am now very interested in ‘people’ and the important lesson for me here is - you are allowed to changed your mind. You can open door’s to new content for your visual language by listening to the voice that says something is scary. For me, drawing people was scary, but not something I couldn’t take action to feel more in confident with. I’m looking forward to my next visit already, to continue practicing my skills and to continue to see the connection and reconnection of people in a world trying to recover from a pandemic.