Worldwide SketchCrawl Day at The Hepworth

This time last week I was out with my fellow sketchers, taking part in the 33rd Worldwide SketchCrawl Day.

The Sheffield SketchCrawlers decided to join forces again with our sister-group in Wakefield, organised by Helen (above), and we all spent the day together, this time drawing in the Hepworth Gallery.

It's a lovely, very modern building, not been open long and has a great collection of sculptures and paintings. They were unfortunately very picky about what materials we could use in the gallery: not only no paint or ink, but no pastels or charcoal (which I'd really fancied using for the sculptural shapes. We even had to have our tin of Derwent pencils 'passed' by the manager!

Unfortunately, there was not much time to look round properly, or there'd have been no time left for drawing. I'm going to go back though, as it's a smashing gallery.

This abstract piece really appealed, as it had so many complex but subtle curves, plains and shadows, but I haven't got it right at all:

I had another go, using some coloured pencils from our shared Derwent tin, but that wasn't really any more accurate. Hey-ho - at least being so abstract, nobody can tell!

We had a great turn-out, so Helen booked us a whole section of the gallery's cafe for lunch, where we filled several tables and rewarded our morning's endeavours with some very nice nosh:

We were once again very lucky with the weather, so instead of drawing inside the gallery all day, as we'd anticipated, we were able to venture outside in the afternoon. 

The gallery is right on a river. You have to cross a wide bridge to get to it. I wanted to stay in the sun and discovered that from up on the bridge I was able to get a good ariel view of some of the outdoor sculptures:

It was so summery, some people sat on the grass to sketch...

I tried that too, but in the end I stood up, so I could get this view over the wire fence towards the boatyard across the river. I decided to have a go with the tin of pastels which Derwent had given us, since they wouldn't let me loose with them inside the gallery. I had taken a sketchbook of tinted, lightly textured paper especially:

I spent a fair while on it, interrupted by bits of chatting and taking photos. Suddenly I realised there was just 20mins to go, so ran back inside and whizzed round, bagging a couple more:

Afterwards we did our usual sharing of the work. As at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, we had a space set-aside for us to use. The quality this time was probably the best ever. Some fabulous stuff was done and, as always, everybody had tackled it very differently, which makes it so interesting.

By the way, if you want to find out about up-coming events in our region, or see what we have produced at recent SketchCrawls, we now have our very own Facebook page, SketchCrawl North where you are very welcome to join us - we are a very friendly bunch!