Bath Street is a small side street in an area known as St. Clements – just to the east of the Oxford city centre. There’s a main road lined with a collection of pubs, eateries, fast food places and a few little shops. There is also a lot of student accommodation in the area and it is just a bit run down and tatty around the edges. For me as an urban sketcher – that’s good. I prefer to draw slightly wonky, even derelict buildings in much the same way as I like to draw old venicular buildings that are a bit warped and skew.
My subject for this exercise in sketching was focused on a local hairdressers – The ‘Loyalty’ hairdressers. It had a couple of guitars in the window and someone had obviously put some effort into decorating the place. This stretched to a big side wall with large lettered graffiti – street art! One of the things with sketching is that it gets you to notice and focus on things that you usually wouldn’t and it adds to the difficulty when you try to decipher these elaborate scripts.
Anyway, here is my view, a couple of my sketches in situ and the end result.
OxfordArtist 