Sketching as a way of seeing and understanding the environment

 On a recent trip to Sydney I, like countless other tourists, used a smartphone to take many photos as a record of having being somewhere perhaps.  Possibly, to have photos to show other people or to look back on and reminisce. However, it occurred to me after the first hundred or so photos that I was unlikely to look at many of these images again and possibly only when deciding to delete once the phone memory was full.

Fig. 1 View facing Sydney Harbour from Centrepoint Tower (Pencil and ink)

So, I decided to sketch from a few select photos and have included a few here for reference.

Fig. 2 View facing Sydney Harbour from Centrepoint Tower (Pencil and ink with graphic design markers)

Fig. 3 View facing Sydney Harbour from Centrepoint Tower (Photograph taken 27 December 2023)

Fig. 4 View of Circular Quay (Pencil and ink with water colours)

Fig. 5 View of Circular Quay (Photograph taken 26 December 2023)

Fig. 6 View of the redeveloped Sirrius social housing project at The Rocks (Pencil and ink with water colours)

Fig. 7 View of the redeveloped Sirrius social housing project at The Rocks (Photograph taken 28 December 2023)

Fig. 8 View of Newtown (Pencil and ink with water colours)

Fig. 9 View of Newtown (Photograph taken 26 December 2023)

Fig. 10 View of Century Hotel on George Street, Sydney (Pencil and ink with water colours)

Fig. 11 View of Century Hotel on George Street, Sydney (Photograph taken 27 December 2023)

 But why… when the photo is so much more accurate… simply for the enjoyment of it!  It was a relaxing and meditative process and each one occupied several evenings after work and I was able to lose myself in the memory of my time at each place.

Another personal reason is my poor eyesight.  With a prescription of minus 14 in each eye I am extremely short-sighted and it puts me in the top (bottom) 1% of people that wear glasses.  Taking a photo allows me to go back and zoom in and see what I missed, to see what people with normal vision can see. The flipside of this is that my near-vision is quite good, although I can’t focus on anything further than 5 centimetres away. This means that when I’m drawing something detailed you will see me hunched over the drawing with glasses off and left eye closed with my right eye hovering millimetres above the paper.

As an unexpected consequence I learned a lot, as to try to record something accurately you need to understand how it is put together and built. I had to look at how the Sydney Harbour bridge was built – the arrangements of steel members in tension – to draw it. Looking closely forces you to appreciate the detail and the monotony of our built landscape, the delight and the decay. Your memory of a place will be enriched, please trust me on that. I would recommend this process to anyone.