20/05/15
We set up our final exhibition on Wednesday. The boxes were placed around a circle and all the sketch books were displayed on the top of the boxes. More drawings were hanging on the strings. The visual impact was pretty good and the visitors were all happy with what they see.

We continued to decorate the box today and I did another abstract portrait. Then we had a fun sketching section that we used our hands to draw and only worked with one colour. Our group leader was trying to tell us that sketching does not have to be expensive and there are always numerous medium to use. Experimenting with different medium and drawing with hands is exciting and fun, the results may not look professional and refined, but the process took me out of my comfort zone and challenged me.

These three pictures were the final drawings on Monday. When I was drawing on the box, I wanted to do something abstract as we have been sketching real subjects for four days. So the idea of this random pattern was inspired by the pattern of the timber flooring in Spaceport. And the portrait drawing was just following the style of the last pattern. The third picture was from the group exercise.

We started to prepare for our Sketchfest Exhibition in SpaceportX on Monday. We doodled on the exhibition boxes, then we did a group brainstorming exercise in groups of 6. Each of us got to say a random word and all of us need to draw the word and pass our paper to the next person. This process stops when we get our first paper back, this session was fun and creative, different people think differently and the drawings we produced was so unique and interesting.

We stayed at Chatham on Friday to prepare our exhibition. Our event group was decided into small groups which responsible for different things. There are film making group, painting group and booklet group. I am in the booklet group and we discussed the layout and collecting sketches from event group members. We spend our afternoon to sorted out sketches and put them into Indesign to form our booklet.

We went to the Chorlton Arts Festival on Saturday. We all did our sketches on A2, and this is a much bigger scale compare to our A5 sketchbook. We also set up our exhibition sculpture roughly and hanged our sketches with some thread around the sculpture to see how it will look like. At the end of the Festival, we also had a chance to see the sketches from the urban sketchers. It has been a unique experience and great opportunity for me, live drawing diffidently challenges my sketching skill and made me learn faster.

On Wednesday, we visited the Whitworth Art Gallery and joined a group of urban sketchers. We were able to see some great sketches from the urban sketchers and learned some great skills from them. One of the urban sketchers taught me to focus on the general atmosphere of the space and indicate materials with watercolour. Also it is important to keep the sketch simple and clean so it is easier to read. He told me to sketch quickly and frequently. This will help to find my own personality and style of the drawing I produced. So most of my drawings on Wednesday are coloured, I found colours are great to indicate materials and creating atmosphere.

The second day started with sketching on the Piccadilly Garden. Before moving to the Market Street, Hakim gave us a brief tutorial. He taught us how to frame the sketching by deciding the main subject of the drawing. He also suggest us to do a small sketch just focused on one small subject. Then we moved on to the market street. We did few 15 seconds sketching exercises and an interior sketching in the Arndale.

The first day starts with a briefing in Chatham by the event leaders. We received our sketchbooks, badges and t-shirts. Hakim taught us some basic sketching skills like the line weight, the shapes, the technique of drawing shadows and different perspective drawing methods.
In the afternoon, we walked from Chatham to the Central Library. We sketched the central library and the town hall. As it is the first sketch walk, my main subjects of the drawings are the landmarks, the drawings are focused on the outline of the building and the general environment around them. I also did another sketch to show the busy movement in the Albert Square.