Portrait of Chloe, host of Drawing is Free
Day Forty-Nine of Sketching People
Continuing on with day 49 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Today I attended the Monday morning session of Drawing is Free speed sketching on Zoom.
Drawing is Free Speed Sketching
Drawing is Free live sketching event is a one-hour speed sketching session, with each pose the length of a different music track, so each pose ends up being between 2 1/2 to 5 minutes. This is the first time I’ve joined the Monday morning session, but I happened to be up and about at 8am, so thought I’d give it a go.
Line and Colour
It took me a while to figure out what to sketch with. For some reason my Uniball Eye seems to take a while to dry and it was smudging, so I switched to a multi-coloured pencil. You can’t really control what colour hits the paper, so it’s an interesting pencil to sketch with. Then I switched to a basic ball point Bic pen, and then combined that with the pencil. And I also added on some splashes of watercolour. I thought they all turned out awful. But then I left them for a bit, and like a good bottle of wine that’s had a chance to breathe, there were actually a few portraits that I was happy with.
I like the Zoom User portrait which was done with the multi-coloured pencil for the gesture sketch first, and then biro to restate and add lines. I like the effect of the ghost pencil lines under the watercolour and biro.
The first sketch of the session was the Drawing Is Free host, Chloe, and I liked how I managed to capture her intwined hands without them looking a complete mangled mess.
I quite like the loose biro sketch of Alistair – it didn’t look like much as a line drawing, but then when I’d added loose watercolour it has a softness to the portrait that I think is quite endearing. It was interesting to sketching in biro, I haven’t experimented with that before. I think it works ok for continuous lines or blind contour.
The rest of the portraits weren’t much to write home about, and there were also a few portraits that went straight into the bin.
I’m not sure that I’m an 8am sketcher, or maybe I just need a bit of a sketching warm up before I join an a.m. session again. And I need to get my art materials sorted out. I’ve never done a speed session before where I chopped and changed art sketching tools so much.
