The first stopping point at which we did some observational drawings and was a 'warm up' stop was a car park, and we were asked to do 10 quick sketches in 10 minutes. I found this quite tricky and only managed 4 sketches in the time as I spent too long deciding what to draw and was trying to put too much detail in to the drawings. Here are the drawings I did from this stopping point:
At the next stopping point we had about the same amount of time and stopped at the top of a street with numerous shops on one side, providing lots of different typography and an old-fashioned building on the other side. At first I wanted to roughly draw the whole street and outlines of people walking by but instead decided to focus on the clock that was sticking out of the old building as it had lots of detailed features. Here is the drawing:
After this stop we were asked to try and draw our surroundings as we walked (which was quite difficult!) and try to capture the movement and noise around the busy road. I did one drawing of the road itself and then drew a few different sketches all on one page:
We then arrived at our next stopping point which was a tiled tunnel and we had to find something interesting to draw within that space, and I decided to focus on a ripped sticker that was on the tiled wall and had begun drawing the mouth of the tunnel when we first arrived there:
Next we stopped at a disused building right by the edge of the road, which was on a higher level than the pavement, giving a good vantage point from which to observe the road and the buildings along side it. I chose to draw a set of terraced buildings as I liked the way they descended down the hill.
For our next drawing we had more time and were asked to focus on one area of interest and spend a lot of time developing the drawing. I took a while to settle on what to draw as I wanted initially to draw the view of the street from top of the hill on which we were stood as I was interested in the perspective of the buildings, but chose instead to focus on one building and look at the architecture, although I didn't get as far as I wanted with it.
For our last observational drawing we were in the art gallery and were asked to draw a piece of work in the gallery that we were inspired by or found interesting. I chose to draw a 3D piece of art work - a chair seemingly made out of bricks that was inspired by Lowry's art of Huddersfield and all the chimneys featured in the work.
I did not draw the whole chair and the lines ended up not being so straight so the chair looks slightly distorted. Overall the workshop was quite fun to do, but I also found the observational drawing quite challenging, as I usually work quite slowly, but here I had to try and sketch quickly as we moved from place to place.
