Sketching Musicians from Texas

I haven't shown you any sketches of musicians for quite a while, have I? Well, I thought I'd put that right, by sharing you some of the sketches I did the other weekend.

We had a very musical few days. It started on the Thursday evening: a band called Wild Bill and the Lost Knobs was visiting my little part of Sheffield, all the way from Austin, Texas. The bass player's brother, Ash Gray, lives round the corner to us and often plays at Café#9. So, of course, they did a joint gig at the café. Wild Bill was a pretty colourful character and great for sketching. I tackled him in my Inktense pencils on a tinted Strathmore sketchbooks, with a little white conte for highlights.

On the following Saturday afternoon, a friend of ours had arranged a musical party in his back garden.

Various musicians from the café played, while the rest of us all sat on the grass in the sunshine. Lovely. While they were here, Wild Bill and the Lost Knobs did a performance, as did Ash. I did my best to capture the flavour of the occasion.

At the end of the afternoon, everyone thanked our host and went home, but only for about an hour... At 7pm there was another music party, at another person's house. Remember a while back, I painted at a similar gig in the Secret House? Yep - same place.

I didn't sketch this time: I needed my hand to hold a series of rather gorgeous gin and tonics. What was slightly surreal was that Wild Bill and the Lost Knobs were playing again, so we got to listen to them 3 times in 3 days! It didn't matter - they were great. As was one of our favourite bands who were there, the totally fabulous Goat Ropers Rodeo Band. The paintings above and below are of them, sketched on a couple of previous occasions.

What a wonderfully sociable, crazily musical time!