Melbourne Rare Book Week continued …Monday to Sunday

Today I am continuing  last weeks summary of the first three days of Melbourne Rare Book Week (MRBW).   On this page are a selection of my sketches from over the past week. 

All of my MRBW sketches can be seen in my flickr album here. I still have a few more to add from the final day at the Fair. 

I attended 23 of the 60 events held in MRBW. The talks covered a wide variety of subjects. All of the speakers were so knowledgable about their topic and passionate about sharing their knowledge with the audience. I started to see familiar faces in the audience of some events at the week progressed and we talked about which events we had attended and why we were there. 

I have been thinking about how I approached the challenge of capturing these events on paper.

I had not been to many of the buildings or spaces that events were held in. And if I had, I did not know how they were going to set up on the day. I had between 45 minutes and 1 1/2 hours to sketch, with my watercolour pencils, Lamy Safari ink pen in my Moleskine Watercolour sketchbook.

I wanted to make each page unique, as each event was. I planned to do this through the use of colour, my position in the room or features of the room itself . I needed to make these decisions within a few minutes of arriving and take my place before the talk began. As part of MRBW , I did not book for any events so that I would not be taking the seating of a registered attendee. Many events were fully booked with a waiting list. 

I was fortunate to have access to a few places before hand and was able to access the collection and use some of the objects as background to the page. The books above are in the Melbourne Cricket Club Library. I could not resist the wonderful illustrated spines. 

It was an exciting and interesting week of sketching and book – my favourite combination !