It begins at Union Station.
You may not notice them as they gather at the northbound end of the platform. They're here every Sunday, just after 3 p.m. The only thing that sets them apart from other passengers is the sketchbooks clutched under their arms.
One member of the group, with wide glasses and long, swept-back hair, is quick to smile and introduce each new arrival to the others. His name is Bobby Chiu. He is the teacher for today's informal life-drawing lesson. There's a rumble and grind from the tunnel, and his students, now numbering 25, get ready to board. Their classroom has just arrived -- and their weekly sketching session is about to begin.
In January of 2005, Mr. Chiu made it his New Year's resolution to ride the subway each week and practise sketching. He was inspired by his own drawing habit on his commute to Sheridan College, where he teaches digital painting.
"In the beginning, it was just me and my girlfriend, Kay, and we would just come and sketch all day, and post it up on the Internet," Mr. Chiu says, referring to his website at . "And we'd say, 'Okay, these are today's sketches from Bobby Chiu's Subway Sketch Group.' I guess everyone kept thinking this is a big thing."
It turns out it was. Before he knew it, Mr. Chiu had a crowd of at least 15 people coming every week to draw on the trains with him, and get a little instruction along the way. Some of the artists who showed up heard about the weekly sessions from Mr. Chiu's classes at Sheridan, others came after seeing his sketches on-line and deciding to join in.
"Education is pretty expensive nowadays, and I know how hard it can be to pay for your education," Mr. Chiu says. "And I like to teach. I'll teach whoever wants to listen."
The group takes up a third of the seats in the car. As the train leaves Union Station, some have already taken out their sketchpads, but most relax, catching up with each other, trading tips about computer graphics.
When the car pulls into St. George station, Mr. Chiu hustles everyone down the stairs to the Bloor line platform. This is where the real lessons begin. Mr. Chiu discovered early on that the most subjects were found rocketing back and forth between Kennedy and Kipling. Today, the car is packed, so the artists are scattered throughout its length. Mr. Chiu moves between them, giving tips and lessons to those who need them.
Around Islington station, now headed eastbound, Mr. Chiu has his sketchbook out, showing a young woman here on her first time an example. "You have a jaw line here . . . and you continue to build." Mr. Chiu says, guiding his pencil over the page. "Lines can be drawn plain and simple . . . or in all sorts of ways."
Gavin Ball, a recent grad of Seneca's animation program, tucked into a seat at the back of the car, saw his art take a "huge jump" since he began coming here last summer.
"[The]thing I like the most is he's really passionate about you getting better. Even if you're at a good level or whatever, he'll identify whatever your weaknesses are and tell you what to improve on," Mr. Ball says as he sketches the young boy standing on the seat in front of him. The boy stares back, fascinated as he appears as a cartoon on the page.
Aaron McLean, another recent computer animation grad, is here trying to take his normally realistic style into the interpretative and fantastic.
"[There's]nowhere else where you can get so many people coming on and off; so many people and so many options for different types of people to draw," Mr. McLean says. "And it really does transfer over to designing interesting characters because there are so many unique people in the city, you know? Especially Toronto, because Toronto is such a multicultural place."
But it's not just happening in Toronto. The moderators of CGTalk, a computer graphics art forum with 200,000 members worldwide, saw the sketches that Mr. Chiu was posting from his weekly rides. They approached him and asked if he wouldn't mind them promoting the idea on their site. Not long after, Subway Sketch Groups sprang up in cities all over the world, from Istanbul to Helsinki. The one condition the moderators asked for is that the groups pay a nod of respect to the original.
"They would call it 'Bobby Chiu's Paris Subway Sketch Group' or 'Bobby Chiu's New York Subway Sketch Group' as kind of like an honorary title, right?" Mr. Chiu says. "It's just an idea and it's free -- it just grew like wildfire."
For commuters, a ride on the rocket can become so mundane it's beneath notice. If art is making the familiar unfamiliar, that is to say beautiful and strange, then when these subway artists take to the rails, what they find beautiful and strange is you.