Responding to a Brief - Exercise 2.1: Drawing on the familiar

When I started this unit I saw it as a welcome opportunity to get back to using my sketchbooks to draw from life. During and after the pandemic I was stuck working fully remotely, which took away the structure of my workday to create some space to draw, either on my lunch break or during my commute.

When I started a new role in March, I picked up a new small travel sketchbook to try to reclaim that habit. I am disappointed that I have not been as successful in that endeavour as I would have liked so far. Here's a short video I made walking through the pages so far. I find drawing on the train more difficult than before. My train line's condition seems to have worsened since I regularly commuted into London, and the movement of the carriage is too much. Instead, I am trying to do more once in the office, but have not found a good routine to do that yet.

There's also a little style study at the end of the video of Ada Lovelace in Sydney Padua's comic. I really enjoy the pen marks they use. I am struggling with creating a useful short-hand approach for drawing people so wanted to copy Sydney's approach to learn more about their choices and how they solve problems.

For the rest of the exercise, I used a small, square 6-inch sketchbook with watercolour paper designed as a travel sketchbook. This was easy for me to carry and I combined it with a pencil and fountain pen. I originally wanted to spend some time at Waterloo Station as the midpoint hub of my commute. My work-life balance was suffering, and I had to put in many long hours at work, so my appetite and energy for that setting diminished rapidly.

Instead, I decided to take my sketchbook to a number of different settings which form part of my daily life. First I took it to a visit to my Mum's house near Swindon. She lives over the road from my sister, so inevitably the day turned into a family get-together!

It was nice to draw some of the shenanigans of my nieces and nephew. When my youngest niece, Matilda saw that I was drawing and painting with inks, she wanted to take part. I would never pass up the chance to have some quality time with her, so she sat on my lap at the kitchen table and I gave her the pencil. I told her I was drawing the family and she liked the drawing I had made on her scooter and she recognised herself.

I said we should draw everyone else, and she proceeded to use the pencil to do her own two-year-old versions of the family. After she needed a break, I decided to go with the awesome mark-making. Remembering what each one represented I drew over or alongside the scribbles in ink. Then Matilda came back and I let her use my waterbrush to colour the images in. I love this spread SO much!

The next set of drawings was when I visited a nearby food hall during my lunch break. Here I could sit and people-watch while eating food and used the time to draw people.

I had grabbed a pencil and pen from my desk before leaving the office and did my best to draw the things that I noticed quickly. Some people stayed longer than others, and generally, it wasn't very busy. I am glad I made the effort to do it, however, and I enjoyed the experience. It's been nice to stretch some dormant artistic muscles!

After this second session, I started to think about how I capture people and information when I am doing this kind of work. My natural tendency is to treat it like life drawing, and I am not that always serves me well. Much like during my courtroom research, I tried to see what other approaches people took to this kind of cafe reportage drawing.

Nishant Jain

I really like this artist's sketchbook work. He likes the same fountain pen as me for his stuff, which was nice to see too! I like the way that he managed to capture the essence of people quickly through just shapes and a visual short-hand he's developed for himself. He seems to concentrate on the silhouette of people and things and doesn't concern himself with too much shading.

Brett Bean

In contrast, I really like the approach that Brett Bean, a comic artist and illustrator takes for his observational sketches. His approach is much more humourous and incorporates more aspects of caricature. I would prefer my own approach to be closer to this, but right now my brain gets locked into trying to represent things more literally.

For the next set of sketches, I sat in a coffee shop in the local sports centre with my wife. We were having some downtime while we waited for our son to finish his martial arts lesson. I made the conscious choice to play around a bit more stylistically with capturing people around me. I am not sure about the experiments; there are little things in each of them which I can learn and take away. Generally, I dislike looking at my sketch work. It's as if my body and brain are disconnected. I can obviously see that I make certain choices and have a 'style'. I just don't like it.

I also noticed when putting together the images for this exercise that I concentrated a lot on people, and less on the space around them. I am not sure if this means I missed the brief of the exercise, but I will try and get a better balance of people and place in the next exercise.