A Masked, Curried SketchCrawl

On Saturday we had another SketchCrawl in Sheffield... 

After last month's Mad Hatter's Tea Party, we thought we ought to get out and about again, so we met at Highfield Library: an interesting and rather imposing building from the street. However, we were all glad to be sitting inside instead, as it was a really wet and horrible morning. 

We mingled with the 'normal' folk, and tried to behave ourselves, though the library was pretty quiet at 10.30 in the morning, so 90% of the people in there were sketchers:

We stayed for an hour or so, drawing the views from the windows and the other unsuspecting punters:

Next, we walked 5 minutes down the road to the rather unusual Rude Shipyard cafe / bookshop. To call it either a cafe or a bookshop is to understate it: the cosy space you can inhabit is divided between three rooms, furnished as if it were still the Edwardian house it probably once was (and all of course crammed with books).

There is a miscellany of lovely old chairs and sofas to sit on, and various interesting things on the walls or in nooks and crannies.

It was as I was just finishing this mandolin, that I got a call on my mobile: Wendy, who had cooked us all lunch, was stranded outside my house with various pans of curry, with nobody to let her in - I had forgotten about her!!

I zoomed back to the house (thanks for the lift Dee), let Wendy in, then zoomed back to the cafe, to show the rest of the team the way to my house (phew) where there was quite a treat in store... 

Wendy and Matthew had between them prepared quite a feast! Matthew, who loves to draw food, had even created 3 recipe cards, like the one above, depicting every single ingredient in each dish he'd made. 

It looked amazing and tasted even better (I was glad I didn't give in to cake-shaped temptation at the Rude Shipyard). As rather a reluctant dinner-party cook myself, I am incredibly grateful to both Wendy and Matthew for volunteering to feed 12 people.

As you can see, we all wore masks for the meal, just to make things interesting then when we had all filled our boots, we laid out servings of the various dished to draw:

The original idea had been to let our lunch go down by sitting around in our masks, sketching each other, but it was immediately obvious that sketching whist wearing a mask is near impossible. 

So instead we took it in turns to model our masks, while the others sat round and sketched, a bit like a life class. Jo set a stopwatch on her phone, which allowed us 15 minutes a sitting. 

Time was getting on, so we teamed up. By chance little Maya came as cat-woman, which went perfectly with the father-and-son Batman duo:

This is Maya's drawing of me in my devil-bull mask:

...and under here is Matthew, one of our two chefs:

A fabulous day. Thanks again to Matthew and Wendy for all their hard work. If you would like to see more photos or a selection of other people's sketches, or if you would like to come along with us, join our Facebook group SketchCrawl North.