Sketches from today

This morning, I headed into Bristol with the sketching group to the St. Nicholas Market on Corn Street. It's a great place - loads of stalls, indoors and outdoors, selling all kinds of art and clothes and bits 'n' pieces. It's usually fairly busy on a Saturday too, so ideal for sketching. I was feeling a bit aprehensive, having not done any sketching at all (again) this week. But I tried not to let that put me off...

To start off with, a few us out sat outside (in November! Amazing!) and I had a go at sketching the stalls opposite us.

I was happy enough with the finished product, but think I ended up putting too much detail in there. I think it might have turned out a bit better had I left some of that out, especially the flagstones.

I then headed into the St. Nick's Market to have a go at sketching some of the stalls in there, but to be honest there's just so much stuff that it seemed a bit impossible to try to draw any of it. 

Underneath the market is a fantastic art gallery, which is packed with some amazing local art. There were some drawings by a Bristol-based artist called Tim Lane. The Jekyll & Hyde drawing in particular really appealed to me - I love the fluidity of the two characters; the fact that you can't tell where one stops and the other begins. There's a really dark undertone to his drawings which I also loved, but I had to leave then because although the drawings were about £200 each, the gallery was offering an installment payment system and my credit card started buzzing in my pocket...

But enough about other artists :)

So, I wandered around a bit more and ended up sitting outside The Crown, looking down an alleyway past some bookshops. One of the bookshops had all these shelves outside which were piled up with books. As I was trying to draw these, my perspective went a bit wonky, and so I ended up with bookshelves that were a bit longer than they should have been, and I couldn't quite figure out how to draw the books. Anyway, the pic on the left below was my best effort.

I did also have a go at drawing another alleyway, trying to capture the sense of narrowness etc. of the space between the buildings, but I got a bit caught up in the detail of an iron gate on one of the doors and then ran out of time...

So that's definitely an area that I need to work on - perspectives and vanishing points and all that. I'm starting to think about whether it would be useful to take one or two art classes now to learn how to do these kinds of things. I'll have to work my Interwebs skillz to see what I can find ;)