Live Sketching at TRIBE: Inside a Surreal Night of Fashion, Music and Drawing at Vout-O-Reenees
IIn May 2024, I spent an evening live sketching at TRIBE, an exhibition by Sharon Bennett and Jamie Ashman held in The Crypt at Vout-O-Reenees in East London.
The flyer hinted at what the night would become: denim textures, fashion illustration, loud typography and the word TRIBE splashed across the top in electric pink. The exhibition explored fashion tribes and style identities, and by the time the opening party was in full swing, the entire venue had become a living extension of that idea.
Descending into Vout-O-Reenees feels slightly unreal. The place has the atmosphere of a painted subterranean fever dream — part bohemian salon, part cabaret hideaway, part surrealist drinking den. Murals crawled across the walls and floors. Lily pads floated across painted surfaces beneath guests’ feet. The lighting was low and theatrical, with shadows bouncing around sequins, glitter, velvet and boas as people drifted between conversations, cocktails and the dancefloor.
DJ sets from DJ Short and Dean C moved effortlessly between house music, pop, disco and stranger unexpected turns, creating the kind of groove where the whole room seemed to coalesce into one moving piece of visual culture.
I was there as a live event illustrator, sketching guests throughout the evening in ink and watercolour while raising money for the Ben Kinsella Trust.
The queue for sketches built steadily as the night unfolded.
What made the evening especially interesting from a drawing perspective was the sheer variety of personalities and self-created identities moving through the room. There were disco divas shimmering under the lights, bohemian wanderers in flowing paisley prints, flashes of mod influence, goth flamboyance, glam-rock energy and people who looked as though they had wandered out of different decades entirely. The one consistent theme was character. Everyone was a character.
That energy suited my approach perfectly. Rather than highly rendered formal portraits, I worked quickly and instinctively, using loose ink lines and selective washes of watercolour to capture posture, silhouette, attitude and styling. At an event like this, that immediacy matters more than perfection. The drawings became part of the rhythm of the evening itself.
People didn’t just quietly collect a picture and disappear.
They laughed, posed with the sketches, gathered around to watch, compared drawings with friends and carried them back into the party like souvenirs from some strange glamorous dream. The live sketching became another layer within the event’s melting pot of fashion, music and visual identity.
Looking back at the photographs now, what strikes me most is how naturally the drawings belonged within the environment. The looseness of the sketches echoed the murals and eccentricity of the venue itself. Nothing felt overly polished or corporate. It felt alive.
That’s something I love about live event illustration in London. At the right event, drawing stops being simply a service operating in the background and becomes part of the atmosphere — a social focal point that immerses guests even further into the world around them.
By the end of the night I left exhilarated, creatively charged and reminded exactly why I love drawing people live. TRIBE wasn’t just an exhibition opening. It felt like a temporary gathering of artistic identities, music, fashion and performance, all unfolding inside one of London’s most eccentric underground spaces.
For a live illustrator, it was an absolute gift.