Shanghai

A month and a half ago I went to see some good friends in Shanghai. I took no work, and ended up doing very little other than eating and talking, with occasional breaks for walking around (mainly from café to restaurant to café...) It was bliss. One thing that interested me about Shanghai was the ex-pat community there - it seems much more pronounced than here in Tokyo (although, what do I know, maybe I'm just not cool enough to be in it in Tokyo), with a number of coffee shops and restaurants capitalising on all the foreign custom. Over an almond croissant and a nice cup of coffee in one of these, (and then afterwards on the subway) I drew some of the following:

Tim

Chris

The famous Avocado Lady of Shanghai

"The happy couple in their natural environment"

The denizens of the Shanghai Metro

Sketchbook page

Handsome hipsters

Pregnant with possibilities

It's been a long summer, and I've not managed to get as much drawing done as I'd have like to. But nevermind, I'm here now.

I've been trying to ease myself back into the routine of drawing by sitting down in public - in stations, coffee shops and the like - and sketching people as they walk by. It's obviously impossible to draw someone in the same way as you'd draw them for a posed portrait; they're moving fast and you just get an impression. Sometimes the drawing doesn't even look a thing like them. But it gets your pen or pencil moving across the page, which I think is important in itself. So, here are some sketches, with more to follow soon.

Sketchbook!

Sorry I haven't been around. I was slightly busy moving to Japan, but let me present some (largely London-based) sketches:

I have a thing about not using first pages of sketchbooks. How wasteful.





I like this one. Origami-paper with pen and ink:



And now for some sketches done from Fernandez & Wells, a nice little coffee shop in Soho:





Detail:





Today's a holiday, and I'm off to Tokyu Hands, the 'creative life store' to hopefully go get ink and brushes. More posts to follow soon.

Cities

An ink sketch of Sana'a, a city in Yemen on the Frankincense trail. I really like the shapes and colours of it.