Skaters at the Natural History Museum

London's Urban Sketchers group met at the Natural History Museum last weekend. The conversations and support from the people who go is always more important to me than the actual act of drawing on the day. I spent a bit of time outside the museum drawing people having a good time on the ice rink, and I offer that page from my sketchbook to you here with whatever season's greeting is appropriate to you. Here's to 2020.

There's more information about London's Urban Sketchers here, and you can see more of my drawings on Instagram.

From London Calling to Never Mind the Bollocks

I’d passed the unassuming church hall behind this church in Highbury New Park around the corner from where we live hundreds of times before I found out that it was, from the 1960s to 2003, a recording studio once owned by George Martin. Here, as the Wessex Studios, the Clash recorded the London Calling album, and the Sex Pistols recorded Never Mind the Bollocks.

As if that wasn’t enough, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, the Specials, Nick Cave, Queen, Madonna, Bjork, the Three Degrees, Elton John, Kylie, the Rolling Stones and many more worked there. The building has now been split up into residential apartments, imaginatively named The Recording Studio.

The writer Douglas Adams lived for a while in a flat in the house immediately next to the church.

Inktober in The Artist magazine

To mark this year's Inktober, I've written an article about drawing with ink for the November 2019 issue of The Artist magazine, which was published on 4 October. It features the work of Cynthia Barlow Marrs, Len Grant and Nick Kobyluch, as well as by me. My thanks to all of them. They are all ink-using artists whose work I particularly admire, and who I have interacted with, one way and another, online and in the real world over the years.

They don't all get involved in Inktober, and I don't always. (Inktober is all about sharing images made with ink on social media with the #inktober hashtag.) I certainly do not intend to post an ink image every day through October (although, hey, I'm 100% up to date two days in). But we all have to find the best way for us. Inktober may just give the creative daily impetus that is needed to make a personal breakthrough. Anything that inspires has to be a good thing.

You can see more of my drawings, which are usually in ink in one form or another by going to Instagram. Some of them may even have the Inktober hashtag. Thanks, too, to the nice people at The Artist for publishing it.

Two days in Amsterdam

Happy family events meant I could only get to the Urban Sketchers symposium in Amsterdam for a couple of days – neatly arriving shortly before the closing reception. The newly launched direct Eurostar service to Amsterdam from London's St Pancras terminates in the heart of the city, close to both where I'm booked to stay the night, and the location of the symposium's final sketchcrawl around NEMO Science Museum. Bags dropped off, I head off with the small sketchbook and a few pens in an effort to meet old friends and perhaps even get some drawing done.

Korte Prinsengracht/Haarlemmerdijk, Amsterdam

It's a little while since I've been in Amsterdam, and of course things have changed. But one of the joys of going to the symposium is being able to explore a place while continually bumping into friends and acquaintances. Some are tenuously known only online, some are regular mates I've known for years, some I have only met a handful of times at past symposiums but feel like old friends, but all have their sketchbooks out and are communally soaking up the place on paper.

From the NEMO ramp, Amsterdam

Around the NEMO Science Museum there are dense thickets of people engrossed in drawing everywhere you look, standing, sitting on every available spot, on walls, in cafes, legs dangling over the dock. There are familiar faces focused on the job in hand, drawings interrupted by happy reunions, conversations about how to endure the intense heat wave that coincides with the symposium. Later, there is the huge group photograph, of perhaps more than 700 people standing in the sun by the dock: at the back where we stand we become just pixels, but it is enough to be there.

Closed to traffic: Willemsburg, Amsterdam, drawn from the Juice Brothers cafe

The closing reception is big, full on, with a cast of hundreds, and snatched conversations, all too brief. There are too many people to mention by name, but I must mention Gabi Campanario, the founder of Urban Sketchers, who it was great to spend time with again. He launched a fantastic movement more than 10 years ago, one he could never have known would develop as it has. Respect too, to those many people who have joined the vast voluntary operation that it has now become.

Anne Frank's house, behind the tree on the right, Prinsengracht, Amsterdam

The final day was spent around the city, drawing with friends before the time came to board the Eurostar home. Next year's symposium is planned to be in Hong Kong, not such an easy place to visit from this side of the world. It was interesting to see a discussion on Swasky's Instagram about the environmental effects of the symposium through the vast numbers of people it now attracts and the flights inevitably made. In my experience, creative people are more alert to this kind of issue than many, and so perhaps some already take measures to offset their carbon footprint, but when even world leaders refuse to accept there is a problem, the sense of emergency we face on the climate issue can be all too easily dismissed.

From the London-bound Eurostar train window

There are more of my drawings on Instagram.

From a Greek island

The latest sketchbook has mostly been involved with a longer-than-usual family summer break to the Greek islands. I don't always find beach holidays the most inspirational times in terms of drawing. I find myself writing more in my sketchbooks when I am away at the coast (I've spared you the daily diary that intersperses the drawings that I have included here). But especially when hanging around harbours waiting for ferries (such as above, which shows the new harbour at Mykonos while we waited for our late connection to Paros to arrive) or lingering in cafes, it is inevitable that the sketchbook comes out.

Antiparos is quiet in relation to some other Greek islands and in some ways unchanged since we last visited it the week after Labour came to power in 1997. The harbour (above) looks the same, and the road turns into a dirt track at the same point on our route to our apartment. The sun still shines non stop, and the beaches are still just perfect for lazing in the shade with occasional dips into the sea. I don't think Tom Hanks or Madonna had houses on Antiparos when we were here before, which they seem to have now.

The beach at Psaraliki: we went back a lot, although there were two or three beaches there rather than just one, all a short walk away. The general idea was to get a place under the tamarisks and head for the beachside cafes after a decent length of time spent reading, swimming and not thinking about the UK's dire political situation.

Over on neighbouring Paros, we looked around Naousa and inevitably spent some time later on waiting for the bus back to the ferry port. The normality and banality of the scene there (below), and perhaps most other bus stations, was the most attracting scene to draw of the lot for me. There was time to draw the postcardy scenic alleyways around the castle in Paros (bottom image), but at the bus station there was no pressure to get the overwhelming beauty of the place, but just its everydayness. Which is what I like best.

It was a great holiday.

I'm on Instagram. Some of these images can be found there.

This sketchbook: from Brexit to Google's new HQ

Here are six pages from one of my current sketchbooks: an A6 one that I generally use across an open page so the gutter runs down the centre of each image (and hence down the centre of this blog post). The sketchbooks always end up telling a kind of story through what I have drawn in them, and during this one (so far) it seems I have been demonstrating against Brexit (above), travelling on the train to see my dad, drinking coffee in cafes, walking with N, and watching London's skyline change. Here they are, in no particular order.

From the London to Market Harborough train

A walk around Woodberry Wetlands

Cafe in Bloomsbury

St Martin-in-the-Fields and South African Embassy, Trafalgar Square, London

London's new Google HQ rises in King's Cross

Five pages from Sheffield and the Peak District

We get the train north from St Pancras to Sheffield, and then head on to Edale in the Peak District, which starts almost as soon as you are out of the city. Standing to draw on Sheffield's street corners with Saturday shoppers all about (above) makes using a pen the natural choice. I prefer to stand up to draw partly because I can work from exactly the point I want to, but also because I can shift around several paces in each direction to make better sense of what I'm looking at. Most importantly, perhaps, is that it means I work quickly and resist the temptation to worry about piddling detail or try to make things look vacuously pretty. There's no need to set out an array of equipment: it's just a pen and a book. I'm not keen to hang around. (The odd bit of colour below is added back in the hotel.)

Barely knowing the city, I end up taking the inevitable choice of city centre subjects, such as the cathedral and winter gardens, rather than the places that may have better represented the city if I'd had more time to explore or arrived with better knowledge. We find some of these places later – the great restaurants of London Road, and the post-industrial grit of Kelham Island – by which time it's too late to draw anyway.

Having travelled on to stay at the Rambler Inn at Edale, thirty minutes away by train, I get the inks out on the window sill to work. The railway line from Sheffield leads up through this valley and behind Lose Hill on the right. It's a less linear scene than found in the city, and the logistics of taking lids off three pots of ink are easier than when working outside, so it seemed a more obvious medium to use. Later, I do another of the same view...

... and then a final one looking out of a window facing towards Kinder Scout. The Peak District strikes me as a more inky kind of place than Sheffield. I'm not saying places always have a medium that is best suited to them, but, for me at least, it seemed like it this time.

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