Introducing SketchJam: Sketchbooks & Beer!

By Lynne Chapman

No, not exactly a SketchCrawl this time. SketchJam is SketchCrawl's younger brother, so to speak. It's a brand new, musical idea that I tried on for size this week.

Remember how the snow scuppered our
chance to draw an orchestra recently? Well, I've been mulling things over with my good friend and fellow artist Martin Hinchcliffe (who also did this lovely painting). We've cooked up another way to draw live music.


SketchJam's world premier (!) started at the Cubana in Sheffield on Thursday evening, where we were entertained by soul and jazz from the 50s and 60s, played by Simon Peat on the Sax, with Joel White on vocals and keyboard.


It was wonderful, and I was bobbing up and down (while also trying to draw!) to all the old favourites I remember my mum and dad playing when I was young. Unfortunately though, as you can see from my sketches, we couldn't really get close enough to the musicians, plus it was a bit dark and VERY warm, so we moved on after a bit, just down the road a way, to The Grapes:


Our merry band of 7, some old hands from previous SketchCrawls, but some new faces too, huddled happily over sketchbooks and beer in a cosy side bar, drawing the locals:


We thought we had missed our chance, yet again, on the music front, but we discovered at 9.30 that we had struck gold: a knot a old folks in the corner suddenly whipped out guitars and spent the rest of the evening taking turns singing wonderful folk music!


We had a smashing evening and all drew and painted our socks off until about 11.00. It was so casual and friendly, bantering with the singers and generally chilling out to music and drawing. What could be better?

Email me if you live in my neck of the woods and fancy coming to the next one.

3 comments:

  1. Wow, this looks amazing Lynne, it sounds like my idea of heaven. What can be more fantastic than good cheer, good music and a bunch of sketchbooks for an evening. And such fabulous work, brilliant!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow Lynne, I really wish I was in your neck of the woods, this looks like such fun and fantastic results!

    ReplyDelete
  3. OOps. I'm still grappling with this Ning thing. I just posted more enthusiasm about your sketchjam on the main comments page of the illo group. I better get some kip now, but I'll dream of getting you over to an East London sketchjam one day if I don't make it to yours.

    ReplyDelete

We love comments and really appreciate the time it takes to leave one.
Interesting and pithy reactions to a post are brilliant but we also LOVE it when people just say they've read and enjoyed.
We've made it easy to comment by losing the 'are you human?' test, which means we get a lot of spam. Fortunately, Blogger recognises these, so most, if not all, anonymous comments are deleted without reading.

Words & Pictures is the Online Magazine of SCBWI British Isles. Powered by Blogger.