I became a little obsessed in this sketch with the pinstripes on the jacket, I could have drawn them over and over, but the reason I chose to post this was for the shadow behind the man’s head that repeats the shape of his ear I found it comic.

Sketching strangers on the street, travelling on the train or in a coffee shop to some extent relinquishes me of the responsibility to be 100% true to physical accuracy and leaves me the creative freedom to experiment with character and the negative space in which they will sit in my sketchbook. When choosing to draw friends and relatives the contract is different, the identity needs to be a physically representation of them on many personal levels and that isn’t possible, no one person sees us in the same way as anyone else. We eat, sleep and breath in a million different ways and for that reason I generally avoid drawing people I know, it doesn’t cause stress to the viewer as they strive to recognise the person within the drawing and I don’t have to explain why I see this person in this way. But this drawing of Ben is simple, the profile, although riddled with faults, is seemingly Ben like, the hair stands in the way that Ben’s hair does, and the hand, though a bit small plays distractingly around the mouth, just as Ben’s does. On several commonly recognisable levels this is Ben. So I guess what I am saying is that there are some general pieces of information that describe the individual in a common way and that following those there a whole load of personal levels of relationship that develop through knowledge of the person both physical and emotional. So maybe I will draw people I know, I just need to isolate their basic physical descriptors and their recognisable habits.

The wind howled and the rain fell continuously for hours and hours and when on the second night of our stay in Angelsey, tent smashed and sleeping in the van, the winds mighty hand tore down our friends tent, they left in the dark of the night, in the driving rain, home to the more temperate weather of Northumberland. With their evacuation the sun peeped causiously over the horizon, crept up the slopes of Snowdon and down onto the Menai Straights. The wind warmed and dried us as it gathered up the suns glow, glistening and azure blue the sea rose and fell and the waves cut deep into the island but Wales’ magnificence again blew me away, almost quite literally.