Getting the sketching started in a new location can take a bit of gumption. Before a trip, I have rosy fantasies of drawing my way through foreign cities but sometimes making the paint hit the paper is astonishingly intimidating.
I had a couple of days in Tokyo on my own, before I connected with Chris and our friends. Jet lag was working in my favour so I was up early and the days were warm and bright. As I wandered around Inaricho, near Ueno, I happened onto one of of the numerous shrines in the neighbourhood. There was a place to sit, where (ironically) local business men and women came to smoke so I got started. As an aside, it is remarkably hard to find benches in public places in Japan. There seems to be a general discouragement of lingering. And also, garbage cans are non-existent. The streets are impeccably clean but it is not that easy to find garbage cans and recycling bins. Hmm.
So, I sketched, listening to the local salarymen gossiping. The sun came around and pushed me off my bench. And so the day and the sketching began.
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