Newtown Fridays

 

 This is a whole bunch of sketches I've been doing on the first Friday of each month, over the last four months. Our Joburg Sketchers group, of varying attendance, have been meeting with some artists from Assemblage at their studios in Newtown on the west side of the city. We join forces for sketching trips to draw some of the nittier, grittier areas of Johannesburg that we have hesitated to venture to before  -though now and then we have been so brave, for the New Year Carnival and one or two other occasions.

The studios are nearby the underside of the big M1 highway, and so far we haven't managed to go further afield than that as there has been so much happening around there. A new shopping precinct, Newtown Junction, being built; vendors cooking, selling and flirting with the construction workers; a music video being filmed with dancers and a young cyclist flying past - luckily over and over so I had a chance to sketch another bit of him as he sped past. (I switched to a new Moleskine A4 sketchbook half way through this series, hence the buff coloured paper!)

 We're going again tomorrow - hopefully we'll get a bit further along on this long, slow sketch crawl!