I was very excited this week to see a pile of Pete Scully’s book “Creative Sketching Workshop” on the shelves in Kinokuniya.

It is a great new book of 20 workshops packed with different exercises to try out.

This photo shows the contents page so you can see the range of topics covered in the book… and yes, I am very honoured to have been asked to write two chapters. Click to see larger size

But before I get to that, I also have a sketch in the chapter on Cafe Sketching written by Shiho Nakaza, sharing the page with my cafe sketching friend Paul Wang. As I was just nearby, I thought it would be nice to go and show the book to staff of KLINK, the subject of my sketch, and of course have morning tea as well!

The first of my workshops is Workplaces and I was interested in the narrative that tools of the trade and workspaces can tell by themselves and also how people work and interact in the spaces that they work. It was really special to also include the work of Gabi Campanario, Carol Hsiung, Chris Haldane, Steven Reddy, and Sylvie Bargain in this chapter. One of the really interesting things that I discovered while writing this workshop was how comparatively few sketches there were in the Urban Sketchers Flickr group that told a narrative about how people interact with their workplace. There are many sketches of people doing things, but how they relate to the space in which they work is an interesting concept to explore. (something for me to do more of!)

My second workshop is Deserted Places.  It was great include the work of Tia Boon Sim and Chris Haldane for this chapter.

 
In this workshop I was thinking about the indicators of previous or future human activity in a place and looking for ways to tell that story in the artwork. I really want to draw an empty concert hall next!

There are a lot of other great workshops, ideas and challenges in this book (I am not going to share too much about other people’s chapters so it will be a surprise!)  Because it is written as a series of prompts/ exercises, I think it will be a very valuable book in our ever expanding sketching book collection.

Just flicking through the pages is filling me with ideas..so I think this book will really inspire you to get out there and sketch. And it is also really nice to see lots of big images in this book!

One final exciting part of this book for me, is that the Asian edition features my sketch on the cover!! It is not very obvious as it is a line sketch of my computer desk but you can see a tea cup and a cosied teapot on the right side. I have not yet seen a copy of this version of the book, this an image from Facebook a few months ago. I can tell you that it was a big surprise when I realised what the background image was. Ah! just discovered, Parka has done his usual great review of the book and his version has this cover.

Huge congrats to Pete and thank you for asking my to be one of the contributors to this wonderful book.

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