Drawing people can be a challenge, especially when your subjects don’t know that you are drawing them and keep on moving. Here is a sketch I made at the end of the meal at the St Clement’s Alpha course this week:

I’d left the table to set up the film that gets shown before moving to discussion tables and, having got that done, spotted an opportunity. Not everybody was in position all the time so I had to try and capture each person in a few short strokes. I used my fountain pen and then added the watercolour last night; unfortunately the ink in the new cartridges is not as waterproof as I had expected, which is another reason why using the minimal number of pen strokes is good!

If you remember previous sketches I have shared, you might also spot that I’ve moved onto a new sketchbook.  I think it is the first time in a long while that I’ve completed a sketchbook. It was nothing fancy – just a small book with quite thin pages that I got free at a conference a couple of years ago. In some ways, that was a virtue – it felt cheap, so I wasn’t afraid to just draw. This book is a bit larger and uses a square format. The paper is thicker (possibly 190gsm?) which means that I can use some water on the pages even when there is another drawing on the reverse and I think I’m now deep enough into the delight of drawing that I’ll continue making use of it.

All the pictures so far are on my Flickr account so click on the image to go to that site and view them. I might share more of them on the blog but tomorrow I’ve got the next of my Observation to Abstraction sessions so that will be generating some more work as well.