Thursday 26 April 2012

Sheffield Steel Rollergirls: illuSKATE this!


I took part in yet another brilliant sketching event on Tuesday night. 


Do you remember February's Dr Sketchy event with the bearded ladies in basques? Well, this time it was Sheffield's Roller Derby team, the Sheffield Steel Rollergirls, complete with helmets, pads and skates. 


By 7pm, the back room at The Greystones was heaving with sketchers, pencils at the ready... And we had to be pretty quick off the mark, as we had to squeeze no less than 8 poses into just 2 hours. 




It was even more tricky this time round too, not just because we had only 5, 10 or 15 minutes per sketch (!), but because several poses involved anything up to 5 Roller Girls on stage at once. 


Even though I took an A4 sketchbook, which is big for me, I just couldn't fit it all in, so my friend Les slipped me some emergency A3 paper (cheers Les!).


Another challenge came from the amount of black it their outfits: with black on black in at atmospherically lit room, it was often quite hard to make out shapes and see edges. I enjoyed that though - it influenced my approach and made for looser, more intuitive drawings. 



I do like it when it's a bit hard anyway. I find the extreme concentration exhilarating and I just love the intensity of so many people, so focused: it's like electricity in the room. 




The effect was exaggerated still further this time, by the background music they played while we were drawing: 1970s punk. 




Thank you to all the Rollergirls for some excellent poses. They kept really still too, which is hard to do at the best of times, but even more interesting on wheels I should think! 


Click here to peek inside more of my sketchbooks.
Click here to read my hot tips for drawing people in public places.
Click here for films of me talking about my book illustration work, and why I carry a sketchbook.

7 comments:

Art Matters said...

When I frist started reading I thought you were sketching while they were skating! Glad they stopped and posed for you. The soft sepia and blue work well together - are those soft coloured pencils?

Ethna said...

Oh....these are just fantabulous!
Thankyou for posting, Lynne.
They've made my day!

Lynne the Pencil said...

Thank you!

The black and white drawings are a 6B graphite stick, the coloured ones are Derwent's Inktense watercolour pencils, which I would highly recommend: the colour is much richer than other watercolour pencils I have tried.

Art Matters said...

Thanks Lynne, I thought they might be Inktense - I tried some in an art shop recently and think they might be on my shopping list!

fados do lar said...

great sketches

Bethann at fruit.root.leaf. said...

Lynne,
Inspired by this post when you first put it up, I have been working with a roller derby friend of mine to arrange something like this here in Quebec City.

We finally got a start, at our regular Monday evening portrait/figure sketching session! I'm planning to do a full blog post from the session, but for now, you can at least see a couple sketches in my Flickr set (http://flic.kr/p/cD5KAj). I'm hoping to get images from some of the other artists, to share the fun!

Thanks again for such an unusual idea!
Bethann

Lynne the Pencil said...

Yeh! That's great Bethann. Hope you had as much fun as we did!