Studies
Gathering Stories
The initial stages of turning people’s real world experiences into stories involves gathering their stories. Sometimes a fully scripted, visualised and structured script arrives in my inbox! But more often than not, this stage involves getting to know contributors and paying close attention to how their distinctive character manifests in this small anecdotal experience that [...]
Dixon St Dogs
Visited Dixon St markets yesterday night to watch lion dancers squeeze their gear into the smallest gap between the vendors to perform before a stunned Friday night crowd, but was slightly distracted by the many pampered pooches, both manning the stalls and cradled by shoppers! Yes, it’s turning into that kind of blog. The lion [...]
Horse Stance
These sketches were from lion dancing rehearsals for the upcoming Moon Festival celebrations in Chinatown. The first is a martial artist in a horse stance during the fitness training warm-up exercises; practicing young lion dancers; and the final sketch, by request by a 6 year old (or so) girl, is one of the dragon heads [...]
Drummer Boy
During the lion dancing rehearsals, there were two giant drums that were setting the pace for the martial artists, one manned by one of the instructors and one by a younger boy. I started running out of pages and had to start working in my smaller travel sketchbook for these. For those in the area, [...]
Costumes
Here are sketches of some of the props and costumes the dancers were using, including fans, ribbons/capes, traditional Tibetan dress and big heads. The big heads are so fun, I’m going to have to try and get clearer images to share when I return later this week. You can click on the images for larger [...]
Dancers (ii)
Here is one more sketch of a dancer mid-gesture, as well as a close-up and one of the friends resting up between dances. One of the things I’ve been looking forward to most about observational drawing at dance and martial arts schools is capturing motion within gesture and shape as it is exercised. In the [...]
Dancers
These studies are from an afternoon spent with a dance class. The group were rehearsing in preparation for performances around Chinatown to celebrate the imminent moon festival, so apart from very quick warm up games, the seasoned troupe threw themselves into one traditional dances after another. It was incredibly impressive how the dancers could perform [...]
