Museum Sketching, Do's and Don'ts..... a Cautionary Tale

I am a museum freak, my mum always said you could put a ''museum'' sign on anything and I'd go and look at it! Sooooo true! Visiting museums and sketching exhibits or paintings is something I love. Seldom seen anybody else doing it but more and more museums are offering sketch evenings for groups. If you do want to give it the go, ask in the museum or art gallery what their policy is. My experience is that large bags are a problem, they have to be locked away in lockers, so I suggest taking the minimum of equipment: sketchbook, pencil or graphite, to be honest I often don't bother with a rubber or pencil sharpener. Be careful to ask about ink pens or fine liners, they are often prohibited as are watercolours. Wet mediums are OK for some and I think taking a water brush and small watercolour box is ideal, it's no fun dragging around a huge sketchbook and paintbox while mooching around trying to find a motif. Try to find somewhere to sit (more about this later) and try not to obstruct the view for others while sketching away. Many museums and art galleries have folding stools but they are often hidden out of sight, so ask! 

What is often a challenge is working in dimmed light, you only see what you've done when you get out into daylight! Now to the cautionary tale ......! 

Having spent some time looking at artworks I came across a room in which Art students were sketching, they were lounging around on the floor, all very relaxed and I felt that I'd been catapulted back in time. Happy to be in a group, instead of alone, I threw myself down on the floor, back against a pillar, and got on with this sketch. 

 ''Der Zahnbrecher” .... the tooth breaker, a medieval dentist responsible for dragging out rotten teeth with hooks and pliers. 

I was so in to what I was doing, I didn’t really take much notice of what was going on around me. When I was finished, I looked around and realised the students were gone and I was alone, this turned out to be a blessing! Trying unsuccessfully to get up, realisation dawned that both my legs were numb from sitting and I couldn't feel them at all, I couldn’t stand up and lurched around, staggering and stumbling while trying to get some feeling back into my feet. As feeling started to return, that horrible tingling in my feet turned my face into a mirror image of the man's above! It was agony, some more drunken lurching and stumbling followed until I finally regained full feeling in my limbs. All the time I was hoping that nobody entered the room to see me in this undignified state and wondering if they had video cameras installed just in case I ended up reeling about in Facebook. 

The moral of this tale is, there is often seating in museums or exhibitions, it is there for a purpose, use it!