Crawling around Melville

[by Cathy Gatland in Johannesburg, South Africa] I’m late to post sketches from the Worldwide SketchCrawl last month, after battling with slow to non-existent internet speeds. We had a good group of ten turn up to the little suburb of Melville, one of my favourite sketching haunts because of the quaint little shops, funky old buildings and bohemian residents and visitors. Its fortunes have gone up and down as shop tenants come and go and crime rises and falls. Currently it’s on the up as some good restaurants have moved in and some shadier businesses have closed.

Over delicious iced coffee at the IT café, the beads salesmen were at their usual spot on the corner opposite, occasionally picking up their wares to walk the streets and dangle them in front of potential buyers in the pavement restaurants.

I looked in at the Tattoo Shop and asked if they minded if I sketched them at work – they didn’t, as long as I stayed behind the counter, and I was given two caricatures as a reward from one of the artists!

Another corner ‘gently worn’ clothing shop where a few sketchers were doing more chatting than sketching for a while (but they caught up)

We met up at the end of the crawl at 27Boxes, a shopping complex made of containers, where we were lucky enough to find these young musicians about to give a performance in the small outdoor arena. We had a chance to brush up on our people drawing skills while listening to great music by the talented and dedicated musicians, some of whom were off to Cape Town to begin tertiary music studies. A good day out and looking like urban sketching is finally catching on in Joburg!