drawanyway.com

If you like watching people in the street, drawing them is even better. People pay good money to go to life-drawing classes, but potential models are all around you. Admittedly, the models you pay do have the major advantage that they stay still. There again, you could argue that a real, moving subject is always going to be more naturalistic than some poor model with pins and needles from keeping in the same position for so long.

You do need a bit of courage to go out and draw in the street, on the bus, or anywhere else public. I am always convinced people know I am drawing them, which means I end up with a lot of pictures of the back of heads. Also, you might as well resign yourself straight away to the fact that you will end up with a lot of unfinished drawings. That’s ok. You are not trying to make a finished piece of work. To my mind, drawing this way is more about these things:

- Practising drawing quickly - always a useful skill

- Learning to draw with just a few lines, and seeing how that can suggest a lot more

- Learning not to be too precious about any finished product - which can be a big impediment to drawing anything at all

- Training yourself to truly observe: do you really know how pockets are generally arranged on a pair of jeans? How a bag hangs from a shoulder, when it’s empty, when it’s full?

- Making visual ‘notes’ that you can expand on later if you want to (remember that link I posted to Jorge Colombo’s pictures of people on the streets of New York? I really doubt he drew them all in situ. He might have taken photos, but it’s more likely he drew a few lines, maybe wrote some notes about colours or other notable things, then finished them off at home).

- And, most importantly, building up your visual memory. If you draw shirt collars twenty times, the next time you want to draw one from imagination, you’ll know just how to do so.

Bleary-eyed, at seven thirty this morning, I made some sketches at the bus-stop, which you can see here. None of them was particularly inspiring, but I did quite enjoy the look of the bubble-headed guy. So, out of these pictures, I got maybe one that got me thinking, that I might develop further one day. The rest are all good practice.

And this one was done on a train journey. I had about thirty seconds to draw a woman I saw on the platform when we stopped at a station. I got some basics down, drew the details from memory as the train drove away. No great picture, but, again, it’s all practice.

Your task? Obvious, isn’t it? Go outside, or into your work canteen, or on the bus, and draw unwitting people. Then post it here.

(By the way, kake had the excellent idea that those of you using Flickr could tag your relevant images ‘drawanyway’, and then you’d all be able to find each other’s work. I think that is a very sensible idea).

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