Sketching on the Cowley Road, Oxford

Recently I had a MOT done in east Oxford and, not being one to sit around while that happened, I decided to do a little walk around the Cowley Road. Those of you who follow my posts might know this is somewhere I’ve sketched before – and I’ll add some links to previous posts below. The Cowley Road could be described as ‘colourful’ with a lot of smaller diverse stores, eateries, phone shops and just a general mixture. Surprisingly at 10am a lot of shops weren’t even open yet – which seems to be a growing trend with shops and shopping centres all over. The main shopping times now seem to be from 10am to about 3pm, with the main throng of humanity going out between these times.

So at 10 in the morning it was pretty quiet, a couple of drinkers setting up for the day, some people waiting for buses and of course some delivery vans – more on that later.

Here is my view – i was really focusing on the fruit & veg store opposite, but the nature of sketching being what it is you tend to spread out and draw surrounding things as well.

A couple of people said ‘hello’ and commented on my drawing in the half hour or so that I sat there – and of course – the dreaded delivery lorry decides to park right smack in front of the chosen subject. Is this one of the prime laws of sketching? Probably not, probably just modern life and a reflection of the amount of cars and vans and delivery lorries that normally form what i term ‘car blight’. Non charging parking spots don’t last long- so I suppose you just have to get used to it, draw something else or find some other creative solution…

Anyway, I continued drawing. Here is my finished in-situ sketch – and a cleaned up scanned version. This is about as far as I got with this one so far…