I have been really enjoying sketching with the Lamy Safari and the De Atramentis Document Brown ink. I especially like drawing foliage with that stuff. Above, I was off sick that day, I woke up feeling achy and exhausted, but by about 10am I really needed to move about a bit so I took a walk down the local park, Community Park. Not a long walk, but I did stop to do a sketch of the path. There’s something very gentle about that brown ink with the park colours. This park has been the scene of many soccer practices over the years, and a lot of games also at the younger age groups, and is one of the main locations of the Davis World Cup tournament. It’s also the park next to my son’s high school, and his old elementary school as well, so we’ve walked across this park so many times over the years. Sketch the places you live your life, that’s what I always tell people (imaginary people, in my head, I don’t get out much). But it’s important. these are the places you fill your memories with. In years to come, these places become part of the dreamscape you go back to when you’re asleep, if you have left them behind. There are places in my dreams, patchworks of places from my teens and twenties, mostly in parts of London that I don’t really go to now, or maybe don’t really exist except in the imagined world. So I draw the real places now, so they always stay real.

This took an existential turn, didn’t it. This next sketch is of another nearby park, Northstar Park, where there’s that big pond. I often run this way when out doing my three mile jog. It’s another park with some youth soccer history, having coached many U8-U10 games here, and held a few practices at U12 as well, it’s always the field with the most random dog poo on it.