Tuesday 26 July 2011

Visualisation

I was recently asked by a Management Training organisation to spend a day with a group of Interantional HR Managers who they had spent the last 9 months working with as a group on various HR projects. I was asked to join them to help visualise their conclusions to enable them to present these to various invited colleagues later in the day.
In the morning I spent about 20 minutes listening to one group and started jotting images down in a small sketchbook (which I gave them at the end of the day). Here are a few of my scribbles:





These images (not all those I drew during this period are shown) won't mean much to you but it does show my 'quick' style.

I was then asked to help the various groups produce images to assist them in their presentations (rather than use PowerPoint) which I don't have copies of to show you here. What I then did, during the group's presentation, was to take 'visual notes' i.e. I drew images that just 'poppeded-up' into my head while they were talking which recorded the various points. Below is a (rather poor) photo, taken using my phone, of the end result which took about and hour and a half (?) :


Monday 25 July 2011

Holiday (brielfly)

Liz and I spent a few days at a Landmark Trust property (Wilmington Priory) with some friends last week and so I took my sketchbook along as usual and tried to do a few drawings in the time available.
The first is of our bedroom - well, a view from our bed, which I didn't have time to add colour to..



The Priory had very nice shutters on the windows and so one afternoon I thought I'd draw them.



I then decided to go outside and have a go at drawing the old Priory....




It was good to spend some time with old friends and catch up with what's happening. Our friend's daughter is one of the fine ladies of the Puppini Sisters - Kate and her boyfriend are just such good company and they joined us for a few days. She'd only just flown back from LA after spending a few days at a recording studio over there. Ooooh the people I move and groove with daaahling.....

Friday 15 July 2011

Commission

Occasionally you get a request to quote for some artwork or other and the other day a request came in from a manufacturer who required approximately 160 individual pieces of artwork which were to be completed in 8 weeks. The images were to be of either London landmark buildings (drawn in a cartoon style) OR caricatures of famous Londoners or Olympians. For you non-mathematicians out there it's a matter of producing three images per day, 7 days a week! This isn't allowing for amends or re-draws of course! So, I decided to have a go at drawing two such London buildings (from photographs unfortunately) to see just how long it would take me.

The first was the London Gherkin:



This took about an hour. The second was St Pauls Cathedral:



Which took a couple of hours at least.
I sent the client a quote (substantial) and suggested a turnaround time of at least 12 - 16 weeks. I heard nothing back......