When preparing for our final exhibition we spent two days at the Spaceport, in the Northern quarter, decorating our cardboard boxes with patterns and sketches.

We spent the fourth day deciding on how to display our sketches as a final exhibition. As a starting point we were given 25 plain cardboard boxes, along with string and orange and white paints. This limitation of materials forced us to be more creative and come up with innovative ways of displaying our work in order to maximise its aesthetic value.

On our last sketching session the whole day was spent at Whitworth art gallery, where we were accompanied by the Manchester Urban sketchers. This was a good opportunity to network with people who are much more experienced in sketching and gain an insight into some of the techniques they have picked up over the years.

The second sketching session took place around the busy location of the Arndale centre. We were given short tasks in which we were allocated only a few seconds to sketch an element of our surroundings. This forced us to become efficient in sketching a moving environment quickly and accurately; preparing us well for the remainder of the day, which we spent sketching inside the busy shopping centre.

During the second part of the first session we spent a few hours utilising the tips we had learnt from the event leaders, whilst sketching the central library and various buildings close by. In my sketch I tried to use the technique of maximising the imperfections by purposely avoiding the use of straight lines, as we were taught in out first tutorial.

On our first session we were given a short induction which told us about the background of the sketchfest festival and its foundations in Malaysia. We were then given tutorials on the basic elements of sketching including; line, shape, shade and perspective. The drawing above shows my attempt at the first task set, whereby we had to draw the person in front of us without looking at or taking our pen off the paper. I feel like my blind drawing of the event leader was quite accurate. :)