View Of Cafe Nero From Costa

I’m in London today, off to see Tedeschi Trucks Band and Blackberry Smoke at Wembley Arena.  Should be good.  Anyway, I thought I’d take the markers with me and draw some people while relaxing over a coffee.

And I found the perfect place to do that.  There’s a Costa Coffee in Piccadilly that’s directly opposite a Cafe Nero with a huge front window.  It means you can sit in Costa and draw all these people in Cafe Nero.  They have no idea you’re doing it and you don’t have to pretend not to be drawing them.

I saw this as an opportunity to do some quick “gesture drawing” to try to catch body poses and not worry too much about likenesses.  I started by drawing with a black rollerball rather than a pencil, and this loosened me up a bit.  I knew that without being able to rub out pencil marks, the drawing wouldn’t be perfect.  And if it’s not going to be perfect, there’s no excuse for not being loose.

I think I managed to catch the pose of the woman on the left but not the rest.  But this was only an exercise, not a proper drawing.  The thing that I hate the most about it is that I went over some of the outlines with a thick black marker.  I shouldn’t have done that.  If I was going to do that, then I should have just used the thick black marker to draw the shapes right at the beginning.

Anyway, the grandmother of one of Nathan’s football teammates expressed an interest in buying this if I ever put it up for sale.  She liked the spontaneity of it.  I can’t take money for this scribbling though, so I’ve framed it and given it to her for free.