Work for Assessment 4 - Drawing on the familiar

I really wanted to do this at work, but apart from my shyness at the thought of drawing in front of my work colleagues I'm too busy working at work to be able to focus on anything more than a sneaky snatched drawing so I went to the Tescos cafe on the first floor which was conveniently quiet and had a good view of the store.

I drew with a fountain pen which has nice free-flowing ink but tends to make me scribble. For rapidly moving people I find it best to do a single line drawing which suggests the shape rather than defines it. The lady on her phone on the left was the first figure that I drew and is distractingly too big for her position on the drawing.

The lines of the shelves going away from me helps to make this drawing more interesting. My favourite figure here is the man holding the pointing toddler bottom right.

Here I started on the left with the people pushing their full trolleys down the aisle. I like the man and his son who look like they are phoning for a taxi. There really was a man carrying a bike, I do love location drawing, who, working from their imagination, would have drawn him in?

Here I was starting to get a bit tired from the pace of it and reverted to just drawing people with little relation to their environment although I do like the lady at customer services with two small children.
After I'd scanned them at home I added some watercolour to make the scenes more interesting.

I used just red and blue and painted in the background to make the figures stand out,  a technique that I have seen Veronica Lawlor use, actually looking for a link to illustrate my point I see that she is also drawing figures with a single line so I am using two of  her techniques.

After I added the watercolour I strengthened some of the lines with the fountain pen. The ink is an interesting petrol blue/green and water-soluble so it bleeds into the watercolour. Usually I would add colour with water-soluble pencil though I don't always add water, I'm trying to be different here influenced by Felix Scheinberger's loose watercolours.
It's not good to keep repeating the same technique at this stage so I coloured the figures on the next drawing.

I don't think that this has as much punch and it's annoying how the next drawing shows through the paper, this was an expensive Stillman and Birn multimedia sketchbook. The middle line of the book is quite deep-set and tends to encourage two separate drawings rather than a coherent two page spread but I don't think that I could handle anything bigger than A5 in a coffee shop.

This pulls it together better but highlights the lack of detail of the shop. For somewhere as colourful as a supermarket maybe limited palette is wrong but my multicoloured pictures are generally rather incoherent. Interestingly, although I aimed to draw accurately what the people looked like, in my drawing some of them appear to be doing something different. This is particularly marked for the ones using the self scan under the red banner. I wish that I hadn't drawn in the glasses on the man who is pointing, he was talking to the security guard who moved before I could capture him and now he is really prominent. Surprisingly despite my earlier mess up with the out of scale phone lady the rest of the figures look reasonably in scale on the page, working from above does make that easier. Now I'm wondering if I should just have coloured the figures that I thought worked best....
For a different location I looked out of my window.

First drawing with a multicoloured pencil. then adding in some blue and burgundy pencils.
I get bored drawing the background so I took a photo and drew on that.

There's no room on the photo to draw much so I painted a loose watercolour background and drew on that.

This works better though the choice of colour for the pencil lines doesn't offer any clues to interpret the picture. The background is a bit dull and the sun came out so I did a brighter version.

It's probably a mistake to draw faces but the lady with the scarf was visiting next door so I got a good look at her. The cars are sketchy to imply that they are moving.
Looking back at the instructions I've failed to capture the quiet moments and I forgot to made any notes on the drawings. I went back to the view from my window but this time on a Wednesday morning during half term when the road was quieter.

Sitting in the house I couldn't hear any conversations but I jotted down my thoughts. This is a drawing where nothing much is happening and the notes were a good way of making it more interesting but it doesn't convey the quietness of the street outside because what activity there was is overlapped.