Meetup drawing London on locations - at West Norwood Cemetery

Two detail studies of funerary monuments from West Norwood Cemetery, done last Saturday as part of a meetup group focusing on Drawing on Locations with like minded artists.
The weather was pretty bad and raining didn't help much drawing outdoor. Still, I managed to pen-draw these two images. I could have done a lot more as it was an amazing, moving, interesting and stepped in the local history. I managed also to take some photos with my mobile hoping that in the near future I will produce further studies of, well, decaying funeral monuments.

Color drawing - study from bronze bust

I made this drawing last Friday, out of one of the dark bronze sculptures on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

I wanted to extract somehow the liveliness of the bust by using watercolour pencils. Well, that is the medium I used but I was intrigued by who may was this person. I couldn't find the name and the author of this bronze and what I was left with was his intense gaze as if  frozen in time for posterity; gazing not at me or any member of the public but somewhere that only him could have seen, inside  his thought and projected in space and time. My study was his gaze again and nothing else, even his attire.

I was only certain of the familiarity of his facial expression.

23 years ago....

Amazing what you can find when redecorating your living room and going trough a huge pile of old junk you managed to collect. I've just found today one of my small sketch books,  dated "Monday 12th November 1990"! No tears were running on my cheeks mind you; nothing like that guy from Amelie who weep when he found his childhood mementos in a phone box. Rather, rather, it felt like a time travelogue if I can say that of what I was doing back then, subjects I was interested for on-the-fly sketches by then; the artists I was studying, reading about and copying, like Seurat,Turner; before mobiles, tablets, and some others gadgets we all have now. Somehow, somewhere we lost something because of too much gadgetry or perhaps we have gained an extra faculty? hard question.