I admit it - I've been in a rut

- and I needed a new project. I've hardly posted since I finished my 365 day challenge earlier this year. It doesn't mean I haven't been sketching, but I just keep making excuses not to post. So I've come up with a challenge which I call - Drawing the Line.


(Cue: Mission Impossible theme music – followed by voice issuing from car cassette deck) Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sketch all 270 London Underground stations. Good luck Dave. This tape will self destruct in 5 seconds.(Smoke billows out of cassette deck)

I like a challenge. In my previous article, I praised the street level station architecture of the London Underground, especially when compared to other European capital city counterparts, where striking station superstructure is very much the exception to the rule. This article was accompanied by a few sketches I’ve made. As I wrote it, I was struck by the thought – 4 stations? Is that all? Thus was born the idea of this challenge.

Any excuse for a return to London and a visit to the Tube is always welcome, but I realised that the best way to achieve this is to not make sketches on the spot, since even a lightning quick sketch takes over half an hour, but to take photos, and use these for reference back home and at leisure. So these are not true urban sketches, I hasten to add.

Rules

Yes, rules. What is a challenge if not a game, and what is a game without rules? The fewer the rules, the easier it is to stick to them, of course, but I decided that if I was going to take my task seriously, then a few boundaries would be necessary. So:-

Rule 1

No drawing stations you haven’t visited during the challenge.

Basically, this is to stop the challenge being too easy. Otherwise, what would be to stop me calling up photographs on Google Images from my comfortable desk in South Wales, and then sitting and copying them in my comfy armchair with a nice cup of cappuccino by my side?

I did consider stipulating that all sketches had to be made on the spot. But It takes me between 30 minutes and an hour to produce any sketch worth looking at, and working this way, bearing in mind the limited number of times I can actually get to London in a year, the task would threaten to last for several years. So In practise it involved emerging from each station building, and taking photos I’d need to make the sketches later on.

Rule 2

On each section of line, you must walk between at least 2 of the stations overground.

If I still lived in London, I might well have made it a rule that you have to walk between every stations. But again, this is ruled out by the time constraints. I still wanted to get a flavour of the context of some of the stations though, and it seemed to me that this was as good a way of doing it as any.

Rule 3

You have one year – 365 days – to complete the sketches.

250 sketches are a lot. Still, from March 2018 until March 2019 I set myself the challenge of making at least one sketch a day for 365 consecutive days. I completed the challenge, but it wasn’t always easy, and required discipline. So while I know that the project is do-able in a year, it’s also enough of a challenge to hopefully keep me interested.

Rule 4

Stations on more than one line only need to be sketched once.

Pretty self explanatory that one.