Urban Sketch Day 15 - 25/9/11

One of the new members of the group suggested meeting up and drawing a location which had once been the site of a Victorian fountain on the corner of Victoria Avenue and Salisbury Street here in the Avenues area of Hull. There is a drive to try and get a new fountain reinstated in the site of the original (website here) and so the location for Day 15 was set...

Victoria Ave/Salisbury St roundabout

A sketch of the original fountain feature (from a photograph)

A view down Salisbury Street towards Park Avenue where another fountain is situated

The Salisbury Street/Park Avenue fountain

22/9/11 Tops of things/Hepworth Museum/Leeds

Had an induction trip with my first year Illustration Degree students - we visited the Hepworth museum in Wakefield in the morning and then Leeds Art gallery in the afternoon. The students had to work in homemade sketchbooks, documenting what they had seen and felt throughout the day and so I took the opportunity to do also do some drawing myself...

The visitors were difficult to capture, however some of the students were easier to draw as they at least stayed still for a short while...

Various figures (Hepworth Museum & Leeds City centre)

Figures in the Hepworth Museum

Various Buildings - Leeds City Centre

Journey home (17/9/11)

Just a few more sketches that I did on my return home from London recently...

View of Greys Inn Road from Kings Cross station

Figures outside Kings Cross Station

Various train figures

Tops of things...

Sadly due to teaching commitments the weekly meet ups for the Hull Urban Sketchers is more than likely going to wind down somewhat. However I posted on the group page for possible ideas of how to keep things going in some way or another and one of the suggestions from one of the members - Quentin Budworth - was to have weekly drawing challenges that members can tackle in their own time and post up for other members to see.

So the inaugral drawing challenge has been set as 'tops of things', an idea suggested by Gareth Sleightholme and inspired by the work of Johann Christian Claussen Dahl.

I had visited London recently and did manage to squeeze in a little bit of sketching, so here are my efforts so far...

View of rooftops from my friends flat 1

View of rooftops from my friends flat 2

View of St Pancras Station

More to come with this as I've got a few ideas that I want to explore...

Urban Sketch Day 14 - 10/9/11

So after continuing on from the Making Marks exhibition the night before into the early hours of the morning, I was somewhat worse for wear on this particular day hence only the one drawing to show... :|

Sugarmill nightclub building

Making Marks Exhibition (9/9/11)

As I'd mentioned in one of my earlier posts (see sketch day 10), I had entered some drawings recently into a drawing exhibition run by Artlink, a local centre for community arts here in Hull (Link HERE) entitled 'Making Marks'. The theme of the exhibition was to take inspiration from local architecture, landscape and  culture which fitted perfectly with the range of drawings I've been working on recently, and all three of my pieces were selected for inclusion :)

The three pieces I submitted...

On the night of the exhibition, one of the other members of the Hull Urban Sketchers group - Quentin Budworth - arranged a wall drawing event where anyone in attendance was invited to draw their favourite parts of Hull to build up a collaborative map of the city using chalk and charcoal.

The night was a great success with fantastic levels of participation from people attending, including contributions from myself and some of the other members of the Hull Urban Sketchers.

L to R: Myself, Lewis Jackson, Gareth Sleightholme

The wall coming together...

And here are the four drawings I included on the wall...

The Church on Princes Avenue next to the Artlink building

Pearson Park folly

Cafe Nero/Maritime Museum - Hull City Centre

The British Extraction Co. building

So a good event overall which I really enjoyed taking part in, and which has rekindled my fondness for doing larger scale stuff with charcoal...

Urban Sketch Day 13 - 7/9/11

Day 13 location was at The Deep - the worlds only submarium (whatever that is!) a terrific tourist attraction here in Hull...

The first drawing of the day - a view from the observatory cafe on the top floor  - entry is actually free to this area which is a bonus, but unfortunately we didn't have access out on to the balcony area because of the wind conditions...

View down to the cafe serving area - after this we all ventured down to buy our tickets to enter The Deep itself...

...a bit of shenanigans with the entry card which kind of turned into a bit of a game of top trumps with some of the other guys ha ha!

Various fish studies - the Piranha was actually drawn later on in the day though...

Left - figure studies of a family checking out some of the interactive displays on the main walk way

Right - Sketch of Gareth Sleightholme drawing the jellyfish

L to R - Jellyfish studies, Mudskipper studies (these were tricky little blighters to draw!), Study of the coral reef

Various fish studies from the upper floor tank...

Figures in front of one of the viewing areas

Various studies of some of the larger fish and sharks

At 2pm a couple of divers started doing some cleaning duties which was a great opportunity for some underwater figure drawing!

This guy had what seemed to be basically a vacuum cleaner that he was cleaning the floor with...

Whilst this female diver had the task of scrubbing fish excrement of the coral  - nice!

A very quick sketch of a large interactive display area

My final drawing of the day was of this viewing window into the main tank...

...and here's a quick digital colour up of the previous sketch

So all in all a pretty good day of drawing with some challenging but really interesting subjects!

...and on a slighty related note here's a personal image I created a while back - wish I'd actually visited The Deep before creating it for better reference... I may come back and add to this now though so all's good :)

Urban Sketch Day 12 - 3/9/11

Day 12 took place whilst the Hull Freedom Festival was going on, so not too many drawings from myself as I was too distracted by everything else going on during the day. We started at the Mirazozo Luminarium in Queens Gardens, which was quite incredible inside, before moving on to the Fruit Market area where some friends of ours were doing some live painting....

The Mirazozo Luminarium exterior... (descriptive quote by Luke Kendall!)

...and the interior

Sketch page 1 - live artists at work

Sketch page 2 - live artists at work

Sketch page 3 - Fruit figures 1

Sketch page 4 - Fruit figures 2

Sketch page 5 - Motley Crew!