Urban Sketch in Tavira

Day Fifty-Two of Sketching People

Continuing with day 52 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. A couple of tutorials about distorting perspectives to create expressive people sketches, and a couple of urban sketches from Tavira.

Urban Sketching People

I did a pencil sketch of this guy on his phone, but didn’t have time to add ink lines and watercolour, so added those at home. When I was doing the gesture sketch in pencil he kept moving his hand. It was flitting backwards and forwards from his phone to his face. And in the image below you can see the pencil sketch of his hand by his face. I sketched his hand in both locations, and then decided which pose I liked best, before adding the ink lines. This is actually one of the benefits of switching to this new approach of doing gesture sketches in pencil. When I sketch in pen, I have to commit to a pose, even if the person never returns to it, but with pencil I get options.

I also captured this women’s portrait, and used some bright watercolours from one of my favourite colour traids: Opera Pink, Phthalo Blue, and Hansa Yellow Light.

I’ve been doing a sketchbook layout out course, and I was experimenting with connecting these two figures using the background colours. With the big white space at the top of the page, I added a location banner using some letters I’d cut out of magazines.

I collected these a couple of years ago when I was into using them in collages, but they’ve just been sitting on my shelf. I’m not sure this type of heading is something I’d continue with, but I’m just at the stage of experimenting how I want to add text to my sketchbooks.

Distorting Perspectives for Expressive People

Here’s the sketches I did during two tutorials I watched. A Patreon Tutorial with Irena Spector, and a Youtube Tutorial with Koosje Koene.

I’ve written a long article about the tutorials I attended last night, and provided some insight into the tips that came out of it, so I’m not going to write much about them here.

When it’s published, you’ll be able to read my articles that delve further into what I learned and what inspired me in these two tutorials:

• Sketching People with distorted Proportions and Perspectives with Irena Spector
• How to Draw Distorted Perspectives with Koosje Koene