My Photo Booth format triple portrait
Day Fifty-Seven of Sketching People
Continuing with day 57 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. I did some urban sketching of people at a new local bar/café in Cabanas, to practice page layout composition, and try a new sketchbook format.
Urban Sketching People at Bar 66
I did a couple of sketches on one of the new cafés that have popped up last month in Cabanas. I sketched people at the cafe I was sitting at, and the adjacent one, just to create a compilation of different people to create an L-shaped scene, leaving room for some text.
Because the people were sitting at different cafes I ended up with a diagonal slant on the layout. But apart from that, I like composition and the depth created by mixing tonal sketched people with watercolour. I also added some sky behind the standing figure on the upper left to balance out the patch of colour on the lower right.
I wasn’t really thinking about a focal point in the sketch and the woman’s clothing is the most prominent because of its level of saturation in that lime green shirt. She’s positioned almost dead-centre, which makes it a boring focal point.
Re-painting my Urban Sketch to Create an Intentional Focal Point
So I had another go at re-painting the sketch to see if I could improve it. My goal was to create a visual pathway from the standing figure on the far right to the seated figure on the far left. The standing figure works as a good focal point because he’s standing alone and is the only one some background colour behind his upper body. I desaturated the women’s shirt, so that the eye continues to travel to the far right.
Number one, this guy had fabulous facial features – but now that his clothes are brighter and his chair is more saturated than the surrounding chairs, the eye is drawn there, and then up to the poem. I used the same green for his chair and the standing figure’s trousers, to create some colour harmony between these two areas of the sketch. I think this composition works much better, now that it has a stronger focal point.
L-Shaped Composition in my Urban Sketch
Today I used an L-shaped layout for my page composition, and I was going to use the sign in the no parking sign in the background as the tall point in the sketch, but then as luck would have it, a customer stood at the curb side for an extended period waiting for his wife to pay their bill. He became my tall point in the sketch, and from there it was just a matter of finding interesting characters to sketch to complete the page layout.
One of the key elements of this type of L-shaped layout, is that there’s some negative space available for text, and I used this space to write a short 4-line poem.
A busy afternoon here at Bar 66,
Soaking up the sun for all it can fix.
It lifts your mood. It can make you smile.
Or is that the alcohol? You've been here a while!
Little Sketchbook for Thumbnails
I did take a little handmade book with me sketch some thumbnails, but I realised that when I sketch people it’s usually over an extended period of time while I’m waiting for people to leave an new arrivals to get settled. So it’s a dynamic composition that’s difficult to plan in advance.
For urban sketches I’m going to have to start with an idea of a specific layout, and build the composition from there, rather than plan it out ahead of time using a series of thumbnail sketches. This is going to take some practice, to make sure I’m thinking about a cohesive layout and a focal point all the way through the sketching process. Rather than my usual approach of just going-for-it!
Photo Booth Style Sketches
At the same cafe I also did a Photo Booth style of sketches. I’d prepped a tall narrow piece of paper to represent the photo strip, although my design only has three spaces for portraits. I liked the idea of an odd number of sketches. And this is the first one I did.
I borrowed the idea from Instagram. There were some artists (can’t find the post) who created a mobile photo booth. They take it to events, and use it as a place to create a series of sketches of people attending. I thought it was an inspired idea, and wanted to give this sketch format a trail run today. I think this is a really playful idea, and plan on incorporating it into my urban sketching adventures. When I got home, I made a hand-bound book filled with watercolour paper, in the photo booth format.
I used my sketch from today on the front cover, and decorated the back cover with some of the flowers I had left over from my greeting card activities a couple of years ago. I used some corrugated cardboard for the front and back covers, which creates a sturdy base that’ll enable me to sketch standing up, with the book in my hand.
