A slow sketching club
It's 7 pm and I'm sitting in a studio I've never been in before. It's crammed with people, but nobody's chatting. Nothing (1) ________ about this in a shared studio, but we're not just sitting there ignoring each other. (2) ________ the opposite; we're all drawing together, silently, in a 'Slow Sketching Club', an idea from northern Europe. (3) ________ our routines, clearing some mental (4) ________ where our attention is not constantly divided between ten different things is the trend of the moment, but it's not easy to (5) ________. The Slow Sketching Club aims to meet that challenge by encouraging people to apply the same discipline to drawing as to going to the gym or completing a task at work. The rules are (6) ________ straightforward: bring a pencil and (7) ________ yourself in drawing the way you could as a child. I've brought a sketchbook which has lain (8) ________ inside my desk for years. At the end of our hour, we're told it's time to stop drawing and it feels like emerging from a deep sleep. I'm off home to carry on sketching.