SketchCrawl in Edale

I'm having an incredibly creative summer. Within days of getting back from the Urban Sketchers symposium, I was off again with my sketching gear, hopping on the train for a SketchCrawl North meeting. 

I decided we should re-visit the beautiful Edale, in Derbyshire (where we had a summer event last year), while the weather is warm and dry: it's just half an hour from Sheffield.

I was a bit worried actually, as the weather has been so very hot, I thought we might all get sun-stroke. Luckily it calmed down for our day out and was a perfect temperature for sitting on a hill with a picnic, or pottering around the village.

I took several different books, so I could keep going while my paint was drying, by starting a new sketch (to stop me being impatient and ruining things). While I was there, I experimented with a new Japanese Moleskin - the pages pull out into a continuous, concertina-fold. I got one for Christmas, but been too afraid to use it. We were given another free at the symposium (Moleskin were a sponsor), so that forced my arm. 

It was perfect for the panoramic view across the valley: I worked on three pages at a time and just kept folding out more as I went along. It was fun with the wind though, and I was glad of a couple of bulldog clips to keep everything from taking off.

After lunch, we walked back through the village for some variety. A farmer was sitting on a motorbike with a lamb across his knees, cutting barbed wire from where it was tangled into the poor thing's fleece:

I had another go with my Japanese sketchbook. It's good for building up a tableaux of linked pieces. During our sharing session, sitting outside the pub, I finished it off nicely by drawing someones dogs. 

It was a lovely, relaxed day. We had some regular members, but also a few very recent additions and a couple who had never been before, which was great. If you are in our area and would like to join us for a future SketchCrawl, just drop me an email and I'll send you some info.

Visiting York Minster with Prince Philip

As regular readers will know, my location-sketching group, SketchCrawl North, has visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park several times in the past couple of years. But my original contact there moved on some time ago and now organises arts and community projects at the Minster in York. Which made me think...

Well, it would be the perfect location for a SketchCrawl, wouldn't it? 

So, on Monday I took the train up to York to meet with her and put together a plan for a day of drawing, which will be part of The Big Draw, but also link in to a local festival, Illuminate York. We walked through the Minster, selecting good locations to focus on and working out timings for the day.

A surreal twist to the day came in the form of Prince Philip, who had decided to pop in that very morning. It was all very hush-hush, so there were no crowds, just a few photographers and people who worked in the Minster. At one point, he stopped to chat to someone and was standing just a few yards away, looking very smart in a rather sharp suit. If I'd had my pencil at the ready, I might have sketched him!

After my meeting, I decided to take advantage of my free access to the Minster, so sat and did a couple of sketches, practising one of the workshop techniques I learnt in Barcelona ('draw buildings as if they were monsters' - big thanks to Inma Serrano). I just dove in: no measuring, no guidelines, a totally feel-as-you-go type of thing. It's far more fun and makes complex architecture, like this vaulted ceiling, a lot less daunting.

The weather was brightening up by then, so I went and did some more sketches of the Minster from the outside. I was having a great time, sitting in the sunshine, drawing away, saying hello to occasional on-lookers. 

I knew John was out until late at home so, with no reason to get back, I carried on into the evening. These geese made me smile: they were grazing a patch of grass between the park and the main road but had also decimated the municipal flower bed:

This last sketch nearly caused me to miss my last train home. All through the afternoon, trains were at 35 and 45 minutes past the hour. I let myself miss the 8.45 so I could finish off, then went into a pub for a half of lager and a packet of crisps, to kill time until the 9.35. It was only when idly checking on my phone, that I realised the last train home was at 9.15! I had to down my lager and run: the cause of much embarrassing burping once I got on board. 

The York Minster SketchCrawl will be on Saturday October 26th and everyone is welcome. It's free and the Minster are even providing some art materials, so just grab a sketchbook and meet us there at 10am. You can check their website for more details nearer the time.

Opening the Wakefield Library Mural

Yes, my mural is up!! We had an official opening on Thursday. 

The printing company, Art Display, put it up while I was away in Barcelona. It was printed onto a very high quality wallpaper then pasted onto the wall - much easier than painting in situ:

I am thrilled to bits with how it looks. It has such impact in the space and, because of the big, colourful characters, you can easily see it from the street, through the library's front window, so I'm hoping it will lure children in. Luckily all the library team at Wakefield are very proud of it too. 

To create the characters, I worked with Y3 classes from two local schools, St Austins Catholic Primary and Flanshaw Primary. Everyone's favourite was 'the gorilla with the blue boobies', as Andy Wright, the Library Manager, put it. The gorilla was created by Ben, who based his character on my Big Gorilla in An Itch to Scratch. Ben's version definitely has a little something extra though, and the Gorilla Fun Book he's borrowing from the library is a lovely finishing touch. Well done Ben! 

The library team have been rushing around, trying to get the mural up and ready before the end of the school year, as we wanted to invite the original school groups back for the opening day. The children got to see their work for the first time since our original workshop in the Spring, and seemed quite overawed by it all. 

We were joined for our celebrations by Councillor David Jagger (Portfolio Holder for Culture, Sport and Libraries), as well as the Service Manager for Libraries and Richard from Art Display. 

After the speeches and photos, I did a storytelling / workshop for the children. The mural was inspired by Dragon's Dinner, but we looked at that last time we met, so I let them choose which book they wanted me to read and the overwhelming winner was good old Stinky!.

The children relaxed a bit once we got underway and they all really got stuck into the drawing:

It was a lovely day and so thrilling to see my work writ so large. So, a big thank you to Andy and Alison at Wakefield Library for organising Thursday, and of course for commissioning me to do the artwork in the first place. 

So, if you have a boring wall in your school or library, you now know where to come...

Urban Sketchers Symposium in Barcelona

I flew back on Tuesday evening from the most frenetic but most creative few days of my year - the Urban Sketchers annual symposium. This is my 3rd year and I can't possibly describe how much fun it is: around 200 people, together in one city, to celebrate sketching, make new friends or meet up with existing ones from across the world. It was so lovely to spend time with everyone and to just immerse myself in drawing. I barely slept I was so over-excited! 

As usual, we did pretty much nothing without it involving drawing and painting, all on location of course: at workshops and demos across the centre of the city, or at lunch and dinner, or just out in the street, where it took our fancy. We swapped ideas and top tips about materials, and we taught each other new techniques and new ways to approach our sketching.

I was teaching my 'Sketches That Sing' workshop for 3 hours every day, which went really well. People said they found it very challenging, but in a good way. We seemed to do a lot of laughing, which is generally a good sign. 

Saturday afternoon was one huge sketchcrawl (tell you more later), but in the two other afternoons when I was free, I could take 2 other workshops (which I'll also tell you about later). Plus I went to a couple of great lectures and learnt about ink-and-stick drawing from the wonderful Kiah Kiean, from Penang. He created a fabulous sketch before our eyes, in about 45 minutes:

I tagged a couple of extra nights on the end of the symposium, which is why I didn't get back til Tuesday. It is all way too intense to just come home straight after. You need time to absorb things, to sketch at a more leisurely pace and to just chill with people (there's barely time to draw breath during the symposium, so much is packed in!). This is me with one of my favourite sketchers, Marina Grechanik from Israel, and the famous (and totally lovely) Lapin:

As usual, I got back to lots to do: there are all sorts of different things going on here at once, as well as me trying to catch up on what I have missed during the week I've been away. However, rest assured that, as soon as I can, I will get all my sketches scanned and on the website.

Plus of course I will insist on boring you with lots more about the symposium. But now, to bed!

Making New Sketcher-Friends

This weekend I have been delivering location-sketching workshops at the 4th International Urban Sketching Symposium, in Barcelona. I gave a 3 hour workshop on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, called Sketches That Sing but, the rest of the time, I have been taking part in the conference, attending other people's workshops and going to lectures. If last year is anything to go by, I will have been drawing and painting more or less round the clock since the moment I arrived. 

Anyway, since I am not back yet to tell you all about it, I thought I would show you the last bit of sketching I did before I left. We had a mini SketchCrawl in Sheffield last Sunday. To celebrate the sudden, incredible weather, we met at a cricket match. Now, I know nothing about cricket and, to be honest, I was only playing the most scant attention to the game. Mostly it was about sitting on the grass at the back of the Cricket Inn, in the dappled shade, chatting and sketching with friends.

When I finished the drawing above, he came over to see and we got chatting. Turned out he was a graphic designer who missed sketching, so I told him about sketchcrawling. Next day, he emailed me this drawing of me, drawing him, done from memory:

I love the way sketching creates contacts between strangers.

The temperatures were ridiculous in the sun that day. I imagine I will be melting in Barcelona: the forecast was for it to reach 29 degrees today, so I'm guessing I'll have been seeking out the shade again. I'm home on Tuesday night, so I'll let you know how I got on.

In the meantime, if you are interested in seeing more sketching, you can browse the rest of my sketchbooks on my website or watch a series of short demonstration films on my YouTube channel.

More Tales from the Lakes

One lovely site I painted, during my week in the Lake District, was Watendlath. It is very quaint and picturesque: a tiny hamlet, with less than a handful of buildings, a river running under an old hump-backed bridge into a small lake and of course hills all round. I was most tempted by the view down the valley though:

Unfortunately, only a couple of minutes after setting myself up, my hair was alive with midges. They were biting my head and my ears and driving me potty. I gradually wrapped myself up more and more until they could only attack my nose:

I was just wondering how on earth I was going to survive the rest of the day, when it started to spit with rain. Oh no! At least that settled the midges down a bit anyway. The rain eased off long enough for me to do the watercolour above and begin the pastel below (I carried on with it from memory later that afternoon, in our caravan, but the foreground is still not quite finished), then it began drizzling again and eventually came back with a vengeance. 

As I discovered at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, pastels and rain do not mix! I retreated down the hill and managed to find limited shelter under a skinny tree, which allowed me one more quickie:

...but eventually, as you can see, the rain got through and I had to admit defeat. Luckily for me, one of the buildings in the hamlet turned out to be a cafe, serving excellent home-made flapjacks and hot coffee. Much deserved I reckon!

Painting in the Lake District

I just took a week off, to go paint in the Lake District (I know - lucky me!). 

As I mentioned recently, I have been feeling the urge to do more landscape work. The trouble is, I really need to work on-location, at least to begin with, and we get such a small window of opportunity in the UK. So, while things were a little less busy in the studio, John and I took ourselves off to Castlerigg: a gorgeously lumpy-bumpy bit of the northern lakes.

Every day, while John went off for a walk, I sat myself on a hill, or by a lake, and sketched my socks off. This is me at Castlerigg Stone Circle, which is thought to be 4 thousand years old: 

While I was sitting there, a lady from Thailand laid on her back in the centre and banged a tiny gong, to call spirits. Someone else proposed to his girlfriend. She said yes and shed a tear, while another stranger took their photo. It was all go! This is what I am painting above (it's watercolours with Inktense watercolour pencils):

As this is all a bit of a new departure, I wanted to experiment as much as possible, so took various media away with me, which of course meant a heck of a lot to try and cram into my rucksack every morning. The pastels in particular were tricky, but I thought they would help me to work larger. I used this old container from B&Q, meant for screws I think, but they weighed a ton and it was like carrying a brick on my back!

We were rained off entirely on 2 days and I had a couple of wet half-days, when I tried to soldier on, but quickly realised it is impossible without shelter. Otherwise, I was out there with my sketchbooks right through until about 6pm each day. 

It was wonderful to have such concentrated time and the opportunity to draw the same hill over and over if I wanted, trying different approaches. I managed to do nearly 50 landscapes, from very quick sketches through to finished pieces and have uploaded all the other drawings and paintings I did in to a new landscapes sketchbook on my website.

The Great Sheffield Art Show

On Wednesday, I delivered 3 paintings to the Octagon Theatre, ready for hanging at the Great Sheffield Art Show. Although I help with the selection process, I have never got around to putting forward any of my own work before. 

Unlike with the Derbyshire Open, I was not able to create new paintings - the submission dates were back in April, so too early to catch my recent batch of work - so I had to see what I could find. I thought I would put in a piece of illustration artwork, an editorial illustration, originally created for an article about ice-cream parlours. It was a favourite of mine at the time and has been hanging on our dining room wall, so was ready-framed:

I also selected a couple of paintings I did the last time I was able to dedicate time to that kind of work. They are both based on the view from my previous studio window. 

The one above is in pastels, like my book illustrations, but the one below is in a mix of oil pastels, conte and oil bar. I used to draw with oil bars a lot - they make a wonderfully bold, painterly mark. 

The exhibition was hung by a team of volunteers throughout Thursday and, that evening, John and I went to the preview.

The show is a really eclectic mix of work, which is the idea: there is always going to be something there to appeal to every visitor. As well as the 'open' element, professional painters also hire space to show a greater body of work. So, if you fancy some inspiration, or are in the business of buying art, get yourself over there now. It's open from 10am today and closes on Sunday at 6pm.

Giddy Goat Visits the Barbican Theatre!

I had an interesting email recently, from the London Symphony Orchestra. They would like to do a production of my book Giddy Goat at the Barbican Theatre! 

Do you remember, ages ago, there was a travelling musical production by Ensemble 360? I went to see it at my local theatre, here in Sheffield, and it was brilliant. The children absolutely loved it.

Well, Paul Rissman, the composer of the score, is now working on the LSO school concerts series and has now expanded his original composition, this time for a full orchestra.

The London performances are scheduled for February 14th. My illustrations will once again be projected onto a big screen in the Barbican's auditorium. It's all very exciting.

The LSO are providing workshops for all the teachers attending the concerts, helping them to prepare their children and get the most from the visit. All teachers will get a training pack, across the pages of which, Giddy will tremble and skitter.

Another nice bit of good news that goes hand-in-hand with all this, is that Orchard Books have been persuaded to do another reprint of Giddy Goat, so that books will be available for children to buy at the Barbican events. Poor Giddy has been in the wilderness for a while now, so I'm sure he is excited at the prospect of being read again!

If you are thinking of going along with your kids, you might want to show them my step-by-step guide to drawing Giddy Goat! They might also be interested in some of the how-to-draw films on my YouTube channel.