Visual Language: Environmental Storytelling

For this brief we were assigned the task of visiting three places to observe and sketch five drawings from each. Two of these places had to be places we've never been before and the other could be a familiar environment. One of the unfamiliar places was a sandwich shop/ tea room. I had never been before but now admittedly it has become a regular place for me to go for lunch. I initially wanted to do observational sketches inside the shop, but due to its very busy environment around 12 pm I decided to take photos to work from instead.

Then using the photos I took, here are my sketches. In this project I most enjoyed drawing people. To be honest, I'm often not very interested in drawing environments maybe because I feel it's a weakness of mine. But I did find it fascinating drawing strangers because in my head I could come up with back stories about their lives.

The next unfamiliar place I went to was Starbucks. As with the cafe I found that these 'unfamiliar' places were not the most original I could have found. And yet I found that what is special about these places such as cafes and tea rooms is that they are places we have all been in our lifetime. No matter what our background is, who we are as people or where we've come from, almost everyone on the planet has been in some sort of cafe in some sort of shape or form. What fascinates me about these could-be-viewed-as-mundane places is that they are accessible to everyone. You will meet every sort of person in one of these establishments. They remind me of the idea of purgatory, that when we die we all come to one of these places like a coffee shop or an airport, to me I can't really imagine purgatory being in somewhere to interesting such as the Olympic stadium for example. 

These are my sketches of Starbucks...

Starbucks (exterior)

View from Starbucks window

Molly and Olly (unfortunately due to how hard I press down on my pencil the markings of the drawing I was doing on the next page came through the paper)

Observational sketches of various strangers who came into the store.

Finally the third set of sketches were the familiar place, of which I chose my kitchen. Although this initially started out dull, I liked the rather more infinite amount of time I had to work on the drawings. Because I was doing them when I was alone in my own place I felt I had the freedom to spend how ever much time I wanted on them. Whereas when I was drawing in a public space I was more self conscious and often wanted to get the drawings done as fast as possible. At the start I was just drawing objects I could see but then my flatmate Laura came in the room, and later Jasper which meant I could do observational drawings of people to make it more interesting.