Category Archives: Surface Gallery

Yesterday afternoon was the third and last of the Surface Gallery ‘Doodle Wall’ events in the Long Gallery of Nottingham Castle. This time we had black panels which made the white pens more useful (and the black pens rather moot). As before, people were initially reluctant to ‘have a go’ but most could be persuaded and, I think, thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

I divided my time between shoving pens in people’s hands and my camera in their faces. This post will show examples from the latter intrusions. I was fairly obvious about my photography but, since many of these are pictures of participating children (as it is school holidays here), I’ll make it clear that any parent or guardian who wants their child’s images removed need only ask. Indeed, the same applies to anyone who wants their own pic removed.

I’ll post a selection of my favourite images here but all are in a collection up on Flickr, here (the ones from this event start about 65 pics down). They are all sized down but if you’d like a copy of the original, just ask.

This post will be accompanied by one on the SG blog which will contain a selection of shots of the works on the wall.

I arrived a bit late so the wall was already underway, courtesy of the SG artists:

but then the people started arriving and drawing, all ages and, it seemed, all nationalities (I never realised how popular Nottingham is as a tourist destination):

Being artistic doesn’t mean being constrained to one medium. Some of our artists turned out to be pretty good musicians and dancers as well:

This one, a chinese scroll with blossoming tree, is one of my favourites, so I asked the artist to pose with it for me:

and this is my favourite photograph, showing the concentration needed to be an artist:

All photos were taken with fixed shutter speed (100 or 60) and I’ve only done a mass ‘re-tone’ of all of the pictures using Lightroom so apologies if the quality is low on some.