Stormy Day in Fordsburg

I'm cutting and pasting this post from the Urban Sketchers website, catching up a bit on posting here on my once again neglected blog - only Feb and life is already too busy!:
For the 46th WorldWide Sketchcrawl on Saturday 31 Jan our group went to the historic suburb of Fordsburg on the outskirts of Johannesburg. We met outside this building on Mint Rd and discovered that there was a bustling market getting into gear behind us. Some self-designated car guards and a vendor selling clothes hangers - everyone trying to make a rand or two for the day...

 Before we could get going on the market, there were rumblings of thunder and some fat drops of rain, warning us to get under cover, so we took advantage of the kind offer of an artist, Hermann Niebuhr, who has a studio in the area to use his balcony to sketch from. We got there just in time before there was one of several deluges. (Sorry about the quality of the images, my scanner is was out of action.) Below are Marlene and John - with the luxury of chairs and a table - sketching the view.

And the sketchers huddling under the tin roof along the balcony - we still got pretty wet with some interesting droplet effects on some of the sketches.