I’ve just been away on a sketching/mooching/laughing holiday with some very dear chums, something I’ve been doing from time to time for years. These trips, organised by the very-moose-like Julian Sedgwick, are moments of heightened drawing activity for me – intervals of proper sketching between prolonged bouts of quotidian daily grind moleskine wipe-out. I always come back determined to keep up the pace, but I never manage it for long.
Here’s a sketch of Adrian Reynolds playing his banjo, which he does with great flare (despite my cheesy sound effects). Click for a closer look. I didn’t draw his face because I was more interested in his fingers. In fact, I’m especially interested in his fingers right now because Adrian is, as I write this, illustrating my next picture book in rhyme, due out next year with Andersen Press. I hope he doesn’t break a nail.
This has unearthed a memory of the beautiful mandolin which someone gave my grandmother, all marquetry and ivory inlay. She never learnt to play it and I was beside myself when she gave it to me. I twiddled with it all afternoon imagining I would one day make beautiful music, left it on the sofa for a moment and my dear grandmother – Bam-mum – who never looked before sitting, parked herself on the sofa with her knitting, directly on top of the mandolin. She was not a small woman and the mandolin was just so many splinters. so I didn't learn to play it either…
More crunch than twang then:-/
It's not so much the fingers as the thumb, I'm finding. Got such a sore thumb – that's just with four illustrations per week and no banjo.You pack a lot of details into your sketches, Thomas, and the figures always appear to be about to spring off the page.Poor mandolin!
Thanks, Rachel. It's a sketch I balalaika.(Oh dear)
🙂
Great drawing, Thomas.
You've certainly got Ade's big toe right. I'd recognise it anywhere.Great fingerwork too…
Thanks, Will and Julian. I didn't draw his face because of what happened last time.