It’s school holidays, we’ve moved house recently, and I’m working on one of my most important projects: connecting my kids with new local friends before school starts at the end of the month. Today… PLAY DATE.
For those who think they have mastered sketching people at the swimming pool (hysterical laughter) the next challenge is obviously to sketch at Gravity Zone, one of Melbourne’s trampoline play centres where children and the occasional energetic adult bounce around in a state of perpetual motion and happy exuberance. So I took my sketch materials to the play date.
One of the children vomited as I was watching, but I didn’t sketch that. Luckily it was not on a trampoline but in the café area…
Below are a few of the more finished sketches of the morning. (I notice that I was using the same book for sketching as the one I had used a year ago at Sorrento in the Christmas holidays. How tidy!)
two boys getting ready to leap into the pit
Hugo stopping to pant after much bouncing with a basketball
a tweenager bouncing in a crop top
a tweenager having an argument with a friend on the other side of the floor
a Mum reading in the café
Another mum reading in the café
You will, I’m sure, have noticed a striking and curious thing. Only one of the sketches actually depicts a person in mid bounce!
I have a lot of work to do to get up to sufficient speed.
endpapers 
I love the sketches and love that you are ‘altering’ an existing book. All things paper are wonderful!
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Thank you! Is that you Ann Martin? I have loved sketching in old books for a few years, and as this practice has taken off in popularity, we now see altered book art everywhere. To me this means it is still a lovely thing to draw on an old book page, but the fact of its being on an old book page is not enough to make it special. So I still enjoy sketching in my rather large collection of dumped books, but I like to occasionally make something more substantial out of the relationship between book and pen by relating the drawing to the existing marks in the book. I find this most enticing in maths, science or accounting books, which often feature graphs, tables or vector curves that lend themselves to becoming other things. Collage is great, and so is found poetry, where the image relates directly to the words. In my case, it’s rarely poetry, and more often irony.
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Delightful sketches, I’m in awe of the lightness of touch and delicacy of feeing you get in your drawings Judy
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Hi Phil. Sorry I am such a hopeless comment replier. School holidays are over. Perhaps I will improve. Thank you for your kind comment which is highly valued as your own work is so skilful, evocative and beautifully finished.
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