Sketch from Photo, experimenting with coloured pencils

Day Sixty-Seven of Sketching People

Day 67 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Experimenting by sketching from photos using a different sketching style and adding different materials.

Comfortable with Ink and Watercolour

I love sketching with dark ink and watercolour, but whenever I get into one of those creative ruts it helps to mix up my art materials or sketching style, to kick start my inspiration again. Good thing I’ve got a good supply of other art materials waiting in the wings to come out and play!

The other day I did a couple of sketches from my travel photos. I enjoy looking back through old photographs to find a scene or memory to sketch. Coincidentally, the two photos I chose to sketch both featured people.

Cartoon Style Sketch

I sketched in ink, but used bright water soluble Tombow pens to colour this image. When you use flat and vivid coloured materials like this, my sketches take on a distinct cartoon vibe. On my usual sketches, I usually leave the teeth as a white shape with no definition, but in this version I added definition between each tooth which makes this cartoon take on a comical appearance. I’ve also made the eyes bigger than they were in the photo.

Lots of my ink and watercolour sketches ebb towards the cartoon/illustrative end of the sketching spectrum. I used to want to sketch more realistic portraits and people sketches, but then I came to the conclusion – why fight what comes naturally! So over the past year or so, I’ve eased myself into my love of sketching people in an illustrative style, but I still like to maintain a realism vibe to the sketches.

I’ve found that recently I’ve been accentuating or enlarging a specific element on a subject, so my sketches take on a slightly caricature vibe. I’m still trying to find the balance of where I want to land on the cartoon to realism spectrum. I liked creating this vibrant cartoon sketch, because it feeds into my love of bright colours, but it won’t be supplanting my love of ink and watercolour. Although I do like using a bright bit of spot colour on an ink and tonal sketch, like on the speed sketching portraits I did yesterday.

Sketch with Different Art Materials

Another ink sketch that I used Tombow water soluble pens on, but in this sketch I also used colored pencils. I really like the texture that these pencils create on cold pressed watercolour paper when you hold the pencil on its side.

I’ve seen a lot of urban sketchers use pencils in addition to ink and watercolour, and it’s a technique that seems to give an added depth to a sketch, so it’s something I want to do more of, so I created a set of Stubbies from my watercolour pencils.

Creating my Stubbies

I unearthed my collection of watercolour pencils from one of my art storage boxes. And I cut them in half to make stubbies, which makes them more portable for urban sketching.

How I made my Stubbies

• I used a scalpel to score the wood all the way around, then
• I snapped the pencil in half.
• I sharpened the end of the top half of the pencil because they have the coloured section at the end which makes it easy to grab the right shade. They also have the names and numbers of the colours down this end of the pencil.

For the bottom half of the pencil I made labels indicating the colour and number, and stuck them on. I’ve stored them away as replacements for my urban sketching set of stubbies.

I’ve taken my stubbies out sketching a couple of times, but haven’t used them yet – to be honest, I keep forgetting I have them with me. But they’re too cute, not to be used. So I thought I’d have a go at sketching a portrait from a photo of Urban Sketcher Andrew Tan.

I used ink and watercolour, and then used the watercolour pencils to add texture to the eyebrows, facial hair and hat. I guess this is a gentle foray into mixed media…

I’ve had these pencils for at least ten years, and they’ve moved from LA, to UK, to Turkey, to Portugal with me. It’s about time they saw some serious sketching action to justify all those air miles they’ve accumulated.