Travel Sketch from Photo

Day Twenty-Seven of Sketching People

Continuing with day Twenty-Seven of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour.

Monthly Postcard Swap

I’m the admin for a monthly postcard swap event in Kick in the Creatives Facebook group. Whenever there’s an odd number of participants, it means I get a swap partner too.

This month my swap partner is in Canada, and on her Facebook profile she had a photo of three girls at the beach. So I did a loose sketch of this trio, and placed it on a background postcard of loose florals using the same colours as the figure drawing.

Drawing Earthsworld Challenge

I did this chunky male portrait from the Drawing Earthsworld Challenge from Facebook. I’ve skipped this challenge for a couple of days because I was side-tracked on other sketching activities, but it was good to get back to it today.

I started this portrait by sketching his hat, and then his face and body exploded out from there. The hat is a little out of proportion, but it actually fits to accentuate how small his head is compared to the rest of him. Fun portrait to do, especially with all of the 5 o’clock shadow whiskers. Although the eyes are probably a little big.

Sketching from Photos – Illustrative

I was looking back on some old travel photos from Turkey recently. I have taken a lot of market stall photos of people over the years, as I like the busyness of the stalls, and the colourful characters that work at the market.

These have a very illustrative style, which is my default/natural style. It’s easy to do this when I’m sketching from photos, or when the subjects I’m urban sketching aren’t moving around a lot.

It’s a lot harder to sketch in this style when you’re rushing to capture a pose, and worrying that the person you’re sketching is going to move around too much, or just move on.

Sketching from Photos – Looser Style

As an exercise, I found another more recent travel photo that I took of a group of people looking through a fence in Portugal at an Emu.

Even though I was sketching from a photo, I sketched really quickly, and these looser lines created less detail. This approach is more indicative of an urban sketch.

I like doing both styles of sketching. Obviously when you’re doing loose sketches, you have to give up on accuracy and detail. But hopefully what you lose on that, you capture in expressiveness and dynamic poses. For me, Urban Sketching is about capturing a moment, and that doesn’t necessarily require exquisite accuracy.