Lunchtime sketching

This lunchtime I dug out my sketchbook and popped along to Finsbury Square Garden for a spot of people sketching.

The first guy I saw who seemed to be still enough for me to complete a sketch was lying on the grass, enjoying the... well it was cloudy so he wasn't enjoying the sun, but the warmth at least. Unfortunately he kept crossing and uncrossing his legs, so it was tricky to get his legs, right. I'm reasonably happy with the result, though.

Enjoying the lack of sun

Then the next person I picked on was holding a phone to his ear with his shoulder and sitting cross-legged with his back to me. I liked the way that his attempt to hold the phone to his ear contorted his back into an interesting shape. In fact, he looked pretty uncomfortable! I'm not sure I really captured the shape of his back very well, though.

His back doesn't look so contorted here

People were beginning to go back to work by the time I finished that sketch so my choices were getting more limited, but the last person I found was a chap who was propping himself on one elbow and writing. His legs were away from me and hidden from my view by his torso. Unfortunately, that's not quite how the drawing looks; it looks like I simply couldn't be bothered drawing anything below his waist. Also, that thing in front of his hand was a cycle helmet, but he got up and walked away before I had a chance to finish drawing that.

This man did have legs... really... he did!

I've enjoyed my little foray into life drawing this afternoon. In fact I'd quite like to see if there are any life drawing sessions I could join without needing to commit to a ten week class or whatever. If you know of a central or East  London life-drawing drop-in session of some sort, please do let me know!

Sketchy details

Hmm.... it's been a while, hasn't it? Sorry. I've been doing creative stuff, but nothing new. And you don't want to read about me making more owly towels, do you? Of course you don't!

Well, one of the things I've been doing, which I've not written about here yet, is that I've been playing with SketchUp. And I do consider it playing; it's something I can do for fun, for hours on end, without getting bored. Some people play World of Warcraft, I draw stuff in SketchUp. It's a pretty powerful tool and I'm sure that some people do consider it work - but what a wonderful thing it would be to be paid for playing with SketchUp!

In case you're not in the know, SketchUp is a 3D modelling application. I first discovered it when I was designing the kitchen for my current home. I loved being able to visualise what the kitchen would look like when it was finished. More to the point it was very helpful for me to be able to see that the red worksurface that my parter liked the idea of so much would look amazing (rather than... um... a bit too out-there for my taste!)

Since then, I've used SketchUp for all sorts of things! I've modeled most of the furniture in our house as well as the floorplan of our house, which made life easier when re-arranging furniture (why heft 600kg of sofa around the room, breaking your back, only to find it doesn't fit where you thought it might, when you could come to the same conclusion with a few mouse clicks?) I lost many of my SketchUp models when our laptop was stolen a few years ago; I was so upset! I now save all my models on Dropbox so that at least if something happens to the computer I don't lose them.

We've been planning to move house recently and SketchUp has been a great way of getting a general idea of how we might use the space in the house we've found. For example, I was able to experiment with the idea of knocking through the kitchen to the second reception room of our new house, to create a big kitchen-diner.

Not so kitsch.

We recently bought an Art Deco hall stand at a fleamarket. We fell in love with it when we saw it and think will look beautiful in our new house. I just had to SketchUp it so that I could include it in models of the new house to see how it looks.

Love at first sight!

Sometimes I just like to model an item for fun. The Ikea catalog can be a good source of inspiration for this sort of thing because it gives some good information about the size of items.

An Ikea idea.

There are things which frustrate me about how SketchUp works. For example, it seems totally illogical to allow users of a 3D modelling tool to place guide points in a model and still have things stick to other items, rather than the specifically placed guide point, as a default. But the frustrations are small and the rewards are huge, so I try not to get too agitated when I'm struggling.

A skill I think I should develop in the near future is that of creating texture files. There is a good pool of materials in SketchUp, but I always seem to find that I want a particular kind of material which isn't available. I usually end up making do with an existing material, but it'd be liberating to be able to open a drawing application, create a texture, save it as a graphic file, import it to SketchUp and get exactly the look I wanted to achieve.

Dream a little dream

Yesterday morning I woke from an incredibly vivid dream of flying over a lush rainforest, towards a gorge. I flew over and into the gorge, under a natural bridge formation created by the collapse of a cave and down to land on the bank of the river below. But the bank was crowded with totem poles and huge wooden hands, the fingers of each having been carved and decorated like the totem poles. I clearly remember the feeling of being dwarfed as I sank down between the monumental wooden fingers and amazed by their scale and decoration. I also very clearly remember that there was a haziness and humidity down amongst all that carved wood; between evaporating river and a nearby waterfall, it was hard to see and hard to breathe.

The dream was so clear to me that I wanted to draw an image from it straight away, This was the result.

Image from a dream: Caran D'ache and pencil on cartridge paper.

The dream is still quite clear in my mind so I hope that there will be more sketches to come.

How can a day off work mean I've no time for creativity?!

Yesterday was a bit frustrating. I'd taken the day off work because I had a few little jobs I wanted to get done. I had hoped that it would also allow me a little time to do some more crafty or creative stuff. But my failure to see exactly how many "little jobs" I had to do and how long they would take meant that I didn't get any time to do creative things at all!

So, this morning I was determined to get the creativity in good and early! I wanted to do a more permanent version of the Dessy Weather sketch I drew the other day. On opening my sketch book, I found a couple of cartoons I'd done a few months ago.

This first was an idea which came to me and I sketched very quickly, but never really developed (I really should one day).

And this one is another cat-themed one. (Um... I like cats quite a lot. In fact, I'm probably borderline crazy-cat-lady.)

And finally, here's the developed Dessy Weather cartoon.