Last weekend my wife and I went to London with our friends.
I am completely in love with London, the amount of inputs your senses get just through a simple ride in the Tube is beyond words.
All in all it’s been one of the best weekends I can remember in a long time, and the fact that my memory can normally stretch as far back as a couple of days doesn’t diminish that.

The only downside of the whole thing is that our friends are really tall, and most of the time I’m with them I think I’m sitting while actually I’m not.
The weekend has been a long constant struggle between one half of the brain trying to suggest “hey, we’re so low compared to other people’s eye level, we have to get up!” and the other half pointing out “you’re wrong, we’re already standing – I think”.
In between several of these silent conversations by the two tenants in my head I sketched these people on the northern line.

There may have been more interesting faces around, but these were the least likely to punch me in the face if they caught me drawing them. The old woman was my first pick, then I got bolder.

Since we don’t go to London every day we tried to squeeze as much awesome stuff as possible in just two days.
The Dream, an exhibition of some rare Michelangelo’s drawings at the Courtauld Gallery, was the first on the list.
Michelangelo made those amazing drawings for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, one of the most important figures in the artist’s life and allegedly his lover. According to some of their correspondence, displayed along with the drawings, I don’t think there was any doubt about it, but I was too stunned by the artwork to investigate any further.

However, I was pleased to ascertain that the knowledge of the Italian language hasn’t been a complete waste of neuronal storage space. I was able to read Michelangelo’s beautiful handwriting with ease, although I wonder how they were able to communicate to each other in those days, with all those flourished words and grammar.
“Withhold thy step my beloved friend, a behemotic palanquin is on the verge of cruising across your path and by doing that probably annihilate your body with… WHOPS too late, I’m displeased!”.

Anyway, my friend Dave and I took our time copying a few of the drawings. If the result is too far from the original I can always say that it’s not easy to draw while a crowd is shoving its way around you.

In the evening we went to see the Swan Lake at the London Coliseum.
It was my first time at a ballet and I was hugely impressed.
I won’t talk about the beautiful ballerina with probably disarticulated arms and hip, or the dancers who could have cracked a hazelnut with the mere flinch of a muscle of their ass.
I tried to sketch a few of them without looking at the drawing pad, just to put down the main lines. I mean, they were jumping around, it’s not like they were posing.
On the second page of unintelligible scribbles I eventually came up with something more interesting, then my wife started complaining about how bothersome the noise of my pencil was on the paper and I had to quit.

Anyway, after a couple of pubs in Soho, a few hours of sleep and a huge hangover we headed to the Natural History Museum.
Unfortunately half of Europe had the same idea and was queuing up for the dinosaurs exhibit, so we had to skip the most interesting part and spend just an hour in a less busy part of the building.
We definitely plan to go back there because it’s one of those places I would personally spend long hours in.
In the meantime we took a few interesting and inspiring pictures, I didn’t realize living beings actually displayed such a variety of hooves, horns, fangs or general means of surviving their environment.
Also, I didn’t realize goats could look so mean and menacing.
I’m going to draw something related to this picture pretty soon, probably calling it EVIL GOATS FROM HELL or something like that.