Last night June and I attended the Backscratchers launch/networking party at Modern Jago, to draw live portraits of the other attendees.
You may know already that this is one of our favourite things to do (especially me, June had to drag me away to get beigels at the end, I was all one more portrait! And the event sadly ended), and this was an especially good group of people to be doing it with.
As a creative with a semi-substantial web presence I do get a lot of invites to creative platform type websites, there seem to be new ones every week so I was understandably a little cynical when I got the email from the lovely Jody, inviting me to draw at this event and to join their website.
But if I was going to put my money on one of these sites to succeed, my money would be with Backscratchers – they seem to be going about things very much the right way and courting the right mix of people, if the crowd at this event was anything to go by.
I spoke to (and drew) interesting people from lots of different areas including events, tv, film, design and web development.
As we arrived fairly early June and I also decided to get our nails done by nailsomething (who also do mini versions of famous artoworks on nails, very cool – check them out). Sadly I was quickly reminded why I don’t usually do this at events, as although they seemed dry my cheerleaderish designs inspired by the Backscratchers logo became smudged while I rummaged through my bag to retrieve pens and business cards.
If only I’d thought first to do what I did later in the night and put all of my pens in my jacket pocket for people to choose colours from. That was fun.
Here’s a great conversation in action sketch of Neal by June
This is my drawing of Annie Hicks
June’s drawing of Gabriel van Aalst
June also got into a sketch-off with typography artist Ade Yeo who was also there to typograthise people’s names
We also drank a fair few exciting summer concoctions by Hendricks Gin, a highlight of the night for me being when they were closing down the bar, one of the barristers (not very) secretly slipped a cucumber and a rose into my handbag. I think it might be a thing. Their branding is excessively eccentric. I mean, in a good way.
A good time was had by all and we hope to do more projects with or through Backscratchers in the future.
