I leaned against the bar, my face partly obscured by the twenty-foot shadow cast by the coffin in the corner of the room. It was still light outside, but where I was the dim yellow glow of the lamplight bouncing off a plastic skeleton gave the pub a dark, macabre feel.

I’d started the evening stoically enough, and planned beforehand exactly how it was going to pan out: get in, watch the event, have a couple of beers and try not to get too involved. Dr Sketchy’s is not an event that takes itself entirely seriously, and it’s not really an art class; more of an art playground. I expected to be in a crowd of a few art fanatics, people who are masters of what they do but instead found myself surrounded by a sizeable group of people who were just having fun and, masters or not, they all had pencils in their hands. Music began to hum in the corner, and a tall woman with jet black hair, dressed in a corset, teeth and blood painted on the cheek of her white face, emerged from the coffin. She looked like Betty Page’s recurring nightmare. It wasn’t entirely what I’d expected from something that advertised itself as life-drawing.

An hour later, and I was scribbling away like everyone else as gothic nurses and bikini-clad sailors posed and danced onstage. I had entirely forgotten about any review I maybe had to do. Lorraine Williams, organiser of the event, gave out prizes for doodlers who managed to incorporate tropical birds into pictures, draw with their non-writing hand and turn the models into monsters. The evening lasted a little over three hours, enough time for most people to fill out their sketchbooks. For others, it was enough time to cover their scraps of paper or dry out their biros. It didn’t matter whether you could draw the Sistine Chapel from memory or if you’d only heard of a pen fifteen minutes before the evening got underway, because the whole evening was very relaxed and never took itself seriously.

Dr Sketchy’s Falmouth returns on August 24 at Mango Tango.