abendgules | My favourite way to spend a day in London

...is playing hooky from work, and going and doing something creative in the city.

I've now taken two day workshops through Sir John Soane Museum, plus a 5 week evening course, in drawing and I've enjoyed every one of them. The museum is a very eccentric collection of art sculpture and artifacts to inspire architects and art students.

Last Friday's was a drawing day in Temple Church, one of the oldest buildings in London, in the heart of the Inns of Court. We spent the morning doing sketches of whatever took our interest, had a leisurely lunch, and then spent an hour doing one-minute studies of specific items - the lines formed by the Gothic arches of the nave, the windows, the sculptures.

It was intriguing to see, as the instructor Lucy pointed out, how when we're short of time we prioritise what to draw and create impressions of depth and perspective without really thinking about it. She showed how each one-minute drawing still had a lot of information in it, as much as a more considered free-time sketch did.

She also brought charcoal for sketching, which I'd never used before. It seems the whole point of charcoal is to soften lines, and create shadows by smudging and smearing. As a calligrapher, it was very strange to deliberately smudge my work - weirder still as a leftie, who struggled to avoid smudging writing, when I was still routinely armed with a heavy pencil in school. To actually make it part of the work seemed terribly risque, artistically speaking.

After the quick studies we had time to do more work, so I settled to drawing the grotesques - I find perspective drawings of Gothic arches easy compared to faces. Lucy gave me some excellent tips on improving faces, with 'measured drawing' (where you hold the pencil out to act as your impromptu ruler) and learn the basic proportions of a face. Faces are tough - and I don't know if I'll achieve actually creating something realistic - loads of artists spend their lives learning how to paint people. But I was buoyed by what I'd learned.

Something changes in my brain when I spend a day drawing, as I did on Friday. On the trip home all I could see was shapes and subjects for drawing, and all I could think was 'where would I start drawing this?'. I marvel at the complexity of ordinary things, ordinary decorations that are commonplace - on built things in particular, which fill my bus route home. Everything there had to be designed (well or badly), and planned, and thought through and drawn, by someone.

It's also exhausting - I came home and dozed off on the sofa til Robert came home.