One of my train sketches.

John Mason’s Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing (London: Routledge), describes different forms of noticing and how these can help us to become better professionals, encouraging us to be ‘mindful rather than mindless’ when it comes to noticing. (page 37).

Part of our discussion in the workshop touched on how noticing, marking and recording is important in the media industry as well. For instance, a writer has to notice people and their traits and characteristics to aid them in creating complex and unique characters. The best fiction has its roots in reality, and interesting characters can be found everywhere in real life if you take the time and attention to notice them.

This rang very true with me, as I have also dabbled in writing and drawing, and my subjects are almost always humans. I spend an hour on the train to get to uni in the morning, time which I often spend listening to music and observing the people around me. Trains, for some reason, always gather the most odd and interesting characters, which are fun to sneakily draw.

Learning to draw has definitely opened my eyes to notice many things that I didn’t usually before. For example, once I painted a study of a nose, and afterwards I’d constantly notice the way the light hit someone’s nose and how this revealed its construction and how I’d go about drawing it.

Whilst I did this type of noticing subconsciously before, after reading Mason, I intend to do it more often and more consciously.