Coloured Elephant

Elephant Tea Rooms
(Markers and digital colour)

In an idle moment, I added a bit of colour to my recent drawing of the Elephant Tea Rooms in Sunderland.

Sketch Crawl : Sunniside, Sunderland.

West Sunniside, Sunderland
(Markers in A4 sketchbook)

This was the first outing for the newly renamed Urban Sketchers Tyne & Wear (Sketch Crawl North East, as was).

Drawing in Sunderland when there's a scheduled football match between Glasgow Celtic and the Black Cats makes for an interesting experience. Coming into Sunderland on the Metro from Gateshead, Richard, Pat and I watched as helpful fans and Metro personnel scooped up a legless Celtic supporter from the platform at the Stadium of Light. Getting drunk that early would certainly mean he'd miss the game altogether, but maybe he didn't have a ticket for the ground. Football is a mysterious game.

Mike led us from Sunderland Metro Station to the Sunniside area, where a bit of regeneration seems to be going on. There's a landscaped sitting area and a bit of public sculpture which didn't immediately attract me, so I started to explore the streets beyond. Straight away I ran into hordes of shambling Celtic fans, bottles and cans in their hands and incomprehensible chants on their lips. I felt a little as if I'd fallen into The Walking Dead tv series and there were bands of Walkers everywhere.

Retreating back to the Sunniside area, I eventually settled down on a wall and drew the first sketch, an interestingly elaborate building with a side turret. It turned out later that just about everyone else had drawn it too, but I couldn't see them beyond the bushes I was sitting next to.

You might notice the written sound effects I recorded on the drawing - seagulls calling, police sirens wailing not very far away and some women in a nearby building cursing, swearing and clashing pots and pans about. The sounds of the city!

I'm not too pleased with this drawing. I started to indicate the shadow on the top of the turret before realising that the same shadow extended down the whole face of the building, so I was just as happy to stop when the others decided to move on.

Elephant Tea Rooms
(0.8 marker in A4 sketchbook)

On the corner of Fawcett St and High St West is a fantastical building showing "a blend of high Victorian Hindu Gothic and Venetian Gothic styles." We all agreed it was an impossible draw, then settled down in the pavement cafe opposite and began to draw it. It soon becomes obvious, when drawing a building like this, that it's a matter of finding the patterns, then repeating them without worrying about there being the right number of elements. I was quite surprised at how much I was able to get done that way.

Next time : The Old Low Light, North Shields, 12 August.

Sketch Crawl # 12 : National Glass Centre, Sunderland

On the Wear (Coloured pencils in A5 sketchbook)

Looking at a Facebook Memory for this day eight years ago, I find I was "feeling ... disconnected." Without drawing any inferences (because there are none), I note that I was feeling something similar yesterday. Maybe it was the weather; after all it's the middle of August in England, so naturally it would turn wet and windy for our latest Sketch Crawl.

On the Metro going to Sunderland, I met up with Richard and we chatted about things while the sun shone on the landscape outside. By the time we got to St Peter's Metro Station, however, it was greying over.  Richard was keen to show us some of the techniques he'd learned at the International Sketching Symposium in Manchester recently, so we gathered round a table in the Glass Centre and listened with interest. Then off to try out the techniques.

Or not. I realised very quickly that doing thumbnails in the sketchbook  (the suggested technique) is what I do already, but I do it in my head. This is partly why I always take so long to get to started - I'm working out the best composition and deciding what the focus will be.

As a result, in the 45 minutes allocated to the thumbnail exercise, I found that although I'd started a thumbnail in the smaller of my two sketchbooks, it quickly moved into a full pencil drawing. And then it started to rain.

Back in the Glass Centre, we compared notes and thumbnails for a while then set about finding something to draw that didn't involve going out in the rain. I discovered that by creeping along the front of the building I could find an area, complete with pigeons splashing about in a big puddle, where I could at least make out the boat I'd drawn as it slowly raised with the tide further upriver. Digging out my little box of Rowney coloured pencils bought years ago, I made my best effort o colour the drawing. There are areas where I feel it became a bit overworked, but it's acceptable, even if, for some reason, Photoshop refuses to represent the greens accurately. 

Unusually, I think I may have drawn something that will eventually become a painting.

[Next Sketch Crawl: Durham Market Place, 10 September, 1pm]

Sketch Crawl #1: Sunderland

Sunderland University 
(Pitt medium fibretip and Pentel Brush Pen in A4 sketchbook)

My very first sketch crawl! And it was fun. I met Michael Lee, who'd organised the day (he might quibble at the use of the word "organised") at Sunderland University on a bright sunny day and after some brief introductions we set to drawing. While I decided on this rather minimalist building (best not to be over-ambitious at the beginning, I thought), Michael opted for something else. Whatever it was, here he is drawing it.

Having limbered up, we moved on to something much more taxing - the Empire Theatre.

Empire Theatre, Sunderland
(Pitt medium fibretip, coloured pencil and grey brush pen in A4 sketchbook)

Talk about complicated and fiddly! I got totally lost with that columned thingy at the top and the swags round the lion's head (for that is what it is) went far too wide. But hey! it's only a sketch. 

By the time we moved on, the band rehearsing in the pub over the road had still not mastered the song they'd been hammering away at.

And so to Keel Square, a new development in Sunderland. Or rather, a new open space, we found, with wind whistling in from all directions and a crazy BMX biker determined to whizz across anything we chose to sit on, so we retraced our steps to find a more sheltered view of the Londonderry:

The Londonderry, Sunderland

(Pitt medium fibretip, grey and blue brush pens in A4 sketchbook)

One of the hazards of drawing in the street is that you may attract the attention of interested but sometimes opinionated passers by. I attracted two today: one who seemed to be the cook in the Londonderry who just wanted know what we were doing; the second who I suspect was a patron of the Londonderry ventured the opinion that what I was doing was "not bad, not bad".

He may have been right. I added the blue wash after I got home and think it may have been a mistake, but too late now ...

Michael, who I think had produced two sketches for my every one, kindly pointed me in the direction of the Metro station. When I got there, the Metro was broken. I dunno, the good folk of Sunderland moaned for years that the Tyne & Wear Metro didn't go as far as Sunderland, so they built them an extension. What did they do? They broke it and made me get the bus home.

Transport snags aside, it was interesting to see Sunderland again after so many years and all in all, it was a Great Day Out. Thank you, Michael!