Whilst spending a lot of time sketching at events with a standard sketchbook and pen Martin Squires was also working on larger studio pieces. When working in two different disciplines, one influenced the other so much so that Martin started to think of ways to sketch on larger surfaces whilst sketching on his travels. The solution was this, the Scrolling Sketchpad, capable of holding long rolls of paper this enables production of on site sketches within a tapestry style format.
The first time Martin used the scrolling sketchpad was at The National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham UK. As part of the museum's 30th anniversary celebrations an exhibition was run and Martin produced a 3.5m scroll featuring 17 machines from the museum. The above short film is by Tom Rochester, documenting the whole process.
After Martin's experience at the museum he started thinking about how he could use the sketchpad to define spaces, pushing his sketching beyond what can be achieved with a standard sketchbook. Whilst he was thinking about this "The Museum" was accepted as part of the official selection for the 2014 Motorcycle Film Festival in New York.
Whilst visiting New York for the festival Martin took the scrolling sketchbook with him on visits to two motorcycle workshops with the intention of using it to document the entire space of each workshop.
The above video shows two revolutions of the 6th Street Specials workshop, New York. This 360 degree ink sketch was produced using the scrolling sketchpad when Martin visited the famous British Bike workshop in September 2014 for 2 days. The remainder of the ink sketch was done in the studio taking a further 4 days of sketching.
Not only did Martin want to use the sketchpad to document a space, he also wanted to recreate the space within a gallery environment. To do this a large scale print of the original sketch was mounted on the inside of a custom mount in order to display the piece as a complete circle enabling the viewer to be inside the artwork and in turn inside Martin's view of the workshop.
Another example of using the Scrolling Sketchpad to define a space is this panoramic of the pits at the Dirt Quake event.
To display the panoramic another custom mount is used to push the edges of the sketch into the viewers peripheral vision.
On the 3rd July Martin Squires was granted access to the garage of the Lotus F1 Team, during the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. This is a panoramic piece was all sketched within the garage during a practice day, a total of around 7 hours of sketching.
Click Here for the Blog Post to read more and see the other sketches from his visit.
