In Leiria with Eva and her family.
Making paper by hand in a mill refurbished by Alvaro Siza.
Grandad’s house….
Jose, from the Leiria urban sketchers.
In Lisbon, and on the beach in Estoril. The water is three degrees cooler than off the Hebrides.
Our flat, and a lady on a train. she came and sat next to me so I hid the drawing.
Isla on the train.
Fraser on the train.
Lunching
Dunfallandy House in Pitlochry, with the family.
Andreas on the piano stool.
Steven building a rocket, Gran doing the crossword.
Pitlochry dam. It’s the fifth time we use get power from the same water and the least effective, but it’s impressive to look at.
In London, in Caroline’s garden.
In Edinburgh, in Matt & Mina’s garden.
On the train
Ronni & Lewis at the Edinburgh Festival
Sketching St Philip’s Church, recovering from the office summer social
The theme is maybe years, or numbers. Seven kids in the rain in a hot tub at Tom Bent’s birthday bash.
At the Macallan distillery. Twelve year old for me.
We cycled round Loch an Eilean with the three kids and stopped to hear the echo from the island castle.
Sketch One from the excellent Highland Folk Museum in Kingussie.
Isla racing up the Landmark climbing rock.
Peabody talking about numbers, huge financial ones, and how you reconcile them with a social purpose.
Three Crabs in Henry’s Cellar Bar.
Helping at the 30th Craigalmond Scout Coffee Morning.
On the DLR. I think it’s far harder to sketch on the DLR than it was six months ago. We have thousands of new passengers from Londons new housing developments, and there’s no longer any space.
Two memorials commemorating the 36,000 who died in the First and Second World Wars with no grave but the sea.
Four blocks nicely composed into a West Edinburgh housing development.
Julie sorting our summer holiday.
Three judges and one of our team at the AJ100 Awards judging.
In York Station waiting for the last train home.
At Silverknowes with about eighty Scouts, Cubs and Beavers.
Soderberg in Soho. The first outside Edinburgh I think. Very nice too.
That’s a sketchbook, minus a bunch of drawings of what we might do the house, and I’m not putting them up here.
Drawing people:
Fraser (& the bit of my family tree that plans to cycle up the Hebrides in 2019).Douglas
Life model PaulAnd in paint. I mean, these parallel lines are all very well but it’s nice to get the brushes out.
The sketches are (pretty much) all on Instagram now at @sandysdrawingroom so I’m not posting them here so much. I like the immediacy of Instagram: draw them, photograph them post them. Quick. Here are some of the drawings from my 54th concertina sketchbook. Music at a fundraising dinner in the Grange Cricket Club.
Members of the Royal High Pipe Band.
Discussing design at a Planning Appeal Hearing.
Discussing design with partners and staff at HTA. We review our projects in every Monday afternoon. Over the course of a few weeks we try to get round them all.The other guy is on a train. I love drawing people on trains now.
The passengers are captivated by their phones and don’t seem to notice. I miss out everything except the person to try and draw them more accurately.
Ali Germain on his way to the HTA Christmas party in London.
Some training with the Scouts.
And a great night watching Deacon Blue’s 30th Anniversary Tour, 31 years after I last saw them. Loved it.
Drawings of people I know and people I don’t.
The London Underground is a pretty unpleasant place: too busy and too hot from from April to October. I avoid it when I can but you can’t use a Boris bike for every trip so to pass the time I’ve plucked up the courage to draw people i don’t know who’re sitting four feet away.
They get off, of course, so I’m quite often left with incomplete faces, but I quite like that anyway.
No negative reaction from any of the subjects so far.
Drawing people I know is more straightforward.
Innes waiting for Fraser to finish swimming.
Fraser & Innes watching football on Tv & Ipad.
Julie in Heathrow. Easier to draw people at events.
Watching the Proclaimers in London.
My mum, and others, celebrating 40 years since she became minister in Townhill Parish Church.
The traditional church hall cup of tea afterwards.
Peter Murray & Richard Rogers introducing the NLA’s exhibition on offsite manufacture in construction, which features a number of our projects.
The Cubs doing a craft project at their camp.
Kenneth Williamson guiding us through an illuminating talk on Edinburgh’s suburban railways. I live right on top of one, so i’m very interested.
At the RIBA Stirling Prize in the Roundhouse in Camden.
Fraser, Isla and Innes at the Armistice Memorial.
The kids watching the fireworks next door.
Listening to a moving talk from Hannah Graf, the UK’s highest ranking transgender army officer.
At Coram, for the launch of Cycle to Mipim 2019.
And finally, a small number of drawings focused on buildings, rather than people. This is Market Street with HTA Sketch Club.
At Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, a really beautiful place.
Back in February: at the beautiful (and somewhat hidden) Ardclach Bell Tower. We stayed in Nairn. I loved running on the beach in the dark and the snow, then retreating back to this cosy flat to warm up.
Culloden Battlefield. The line of the Red Coats and the line of the Jacobites, in the snow. The bothy on the left was a field hospital, the battle was over in an hour. There’s not much in the sketch, but standing here and looking gave me the time to consider what had happened.
The aftermath: the impressive Fort George. The Victorian splendour of Nairn.
Back amongst the sculptural shapes of the city.Chatting to the architects of EH4 and listening to a theory about how the spaces we make and the patterns of ownership contributes to the loneliness that afflicts society.
At the Devil’s Cut to celebrate Craig Jone’s Rowley’s 50th. Craig is trying out fifty a wee bit before me. I’ll check how he gets on, if he doesn’t like it maybe I’ll not bother.
Some folk on the tube. I used to be shy about drawing people on the tube but now I realise we are so close together that everyone is pretending there is nobody else here.
A great ceilidh to end a lovely day celebrating Jennie & Steven’s wedding.
Sketching the three beautiful bridges while listening to three good speeches. Family weddings are so much easier than when I last turned up at them twenty five years ago. This is mostly because I’ve decided how many cheeks to kiss and nobody asks me if it will be my turn next.
At the lovely ceremony in Dalmeny Church. The four guys in front of me are Andreas, Ruari, Marc and Douglas: three boys and their dad. As the register was signed they played a brass medley that ranged from Wild Mountain Thyme to Star Wars. It was amusing for everyone and moving for some of us, a memory of my dad. A very special event.
That was undoubtedly the main event of the last wee while, but here are a few other sketches of recent events. Above is Fraser at World of Wings. We learnt about how the vulture is really a good thing, despite the reputation. He cleans up after animals have already died and gets disease out of the eco system. I liked the red tailed buzzard as he was happy to pose for a sketch.
Watching a film about the housing crisis: dispossession. We need more subsidised housing, across the country.
Trying to get planning to put new homes on brownfield land, but people make it difficult so don’t expect all our housing to come through this route.
It’s not easy. You might need a barrister. He turned up with his suitcase of papers. Another reminder of my late father.Duff House.
At a talk about the excellent work of architects Reiach & Hall.
Staying at the Culpeper. A London pub with five bedrooms.
A small businesses being creative and making the most of every inch of space in our cities. The opposite of bland hotels with long corridors and a smell concocted by an expert in user experience. Loved it.
The last drawing of the year, at Hugh & Murray’s house
The party is over there. I’m watching from the far side of the table.
The Kerrs watching Elizabeth II (trad).
Watching the panto-esque Arabian Nights at the Lyceum.
Fraser watching the TV football chat before going to watch the Pars beat Falkirk 2-0.
Watching Innes work through two days of Lego building.
In London, by the office, I choose to sit in the not so nice cafe in order to watch the diners in the nice one on the far side of the street.
Recent Comments