India 2024: Washing Linen, Fishing Marlin

What do washing linen and catching marlin have in common? Not much other than the fact that when I need to capture super-quick action, I turn to gesture drawing with my brush pen. (If you receive my monthly newsletter, it has a writeup on using the brush pen to create a broad range of strokes)

I joined Urban Sketchers Goa at the jetty across from Panjim one evening just as the deep sea fishing boats came in. Giant marlin were offloaded very quickly, and after spending some precious time gawking at the size of the fish, I realized this was a quick moving scene, about to come to an end very soon. So it was straight to the brushpen and bold gesture drawing.

Pulleys take fish off the boats and it takes two or three men to load each fish on the scale. The fish are weighed and immediately transferred to refrigerated trucks standing just a few meters away. The biggest fish that came in today? 69 kilos (that’s 150ish lbs). Nothing unusual about that, I was told.

This next quick sketch is from a dhobi ghat (Outdoor Laundry) in Mumbai. Here, the washermen wringing out the clothes before hanging them to dry with an ingenious and simple machine where a handcrank that you can rotate whirls the clothes inside a metal drum.

Not all my quick sketches are with a brush pen. This next one, sketched with a fude pen (see Supplies tab for details), is at the washing cubicles where clothes are beaten against a flat stone to clean them. Loud thwacking sounds and lots of sprayed water accompany the action. And yes, you will have some of that land on your page, but that only makes the sketch more authentic, right?

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More posts in this series from India coming up soon. You can see earlier posts in the series here:
• The Study Hall of Dreams and Hopes
• Crawford Market

Gateway to India is a 10-day workshop based in India that I run with my co-instructor, Zainab Tambawala. The next session is in late January 2025. Workshop details will be announced by March 2024. If you are interested in getting on an early sign-up list, write to me at suhita@gmail.com and let me know!