Street Art Wall For Loughborough University London, 2021

East London based artist Lydia Thornley’s drawing is part of multi-stranded practice in graphic design, creative direction and reportage sketching. Trained in graphic design in times of specialisation, drawing was, for decades, the unseen part of Lydia’s work – the thinking on paper, the workings-out, the roughs. Then Lydia became a sketcher by accident. Designing a studio booklet ‘This is shorthand’ about drawing as part of her design practice, she was challenged to do a drawing a day until it had to go to press. But she didn’t stop…

Lydia has a particular interest in looking through drawing and her work often includes notes. Her quick, gestural style is used for sketching live at events, in nature and in urban locations; investigative drawing for research; mapping places and processes; illustration of organisations’ work; and portrait sketching. Her personal work includes ‘Dispatches from a Small World’, a nature reportage project from her London garden. Lydia also guides sketchwalks and sketching sessions. Lydia likes readily-available materials and often works on waste, handed-down and repurposed paper and board.