Urban Sketching a fellow Sketcher at the Airport

Day One Hundred and Fifty-Six of Sketching People

Continuing on with day 156 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Sketched during my flight home from the  Urban Sketcher’s Symposium  in Toulouse to Faro.

Urban Sketching People at Toulouse Airport

Usually I’m the only one I see sketching at the airport, but because this was Toulouse, and they’d been thousands of sketchers here for the symposium – Sunday afternoon at Toulouse Airport was chock full of scribblers, which was a real novelty.

I began by creating a tonal sketch, and using contrast to separate the foreground, mid-ground, and background from each other.

• Foreground – dark grey contour shapes
• Mid-ground – ink only line drawing
• Background – light grey buildings with cross hatching

This tonal variation helps to separate the levels to add depth, and I like the use of continuous line contour drawing to give the impression of shapes rather than adding the full detail.

Waiting to Board

While we were lining up to board, a fellow sketcher was squatting on the floor and frantically sketching. I used a limited colour palette on the main figure, and tonal shading with ink lines on the standing figure. The more I mix colour with black and white, the more I realise this is a sketching style I’m drawn too.

Urban Sketching People on the Plane

One of my fellow passengers spent the entire flight playing Tetris. That was probably one of the first games I got engrossed in when it first came out – good to see it’s had some longevity. But I don’t have the time or patience for those kinds of repetitive games anymore. I’m so glad I discovered sketching as a replacement past-time.

The main focus of this sketch was the video game, and I ended up making the hands over-sized. I like that when you accentuate one part of the sketch it helps to draw your eye to a specific element.

I tried a little cross hatching on the seat, but I don’t really like that partial level of detailing. I think cross hatching has to be an all or nothing decision. Either the entire sketch needs to be line drawn with cross hatching, or just don’t include any cross hatching. This half-in, half-out sketching style doesn’t really do it for me.

My final sketch was another experiment of using competing sketching styles. In this case it’s line drawn subjects with no tonal shading, and a coloured background. This marrying of styles creates a nice contrast.

I created some depth with the figures by varying the line width. The sleeping man in the foreground was sketched with a wider nib, and I used a narrower fine-liner for the background figure.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to mix colour and black and white differently in each of these sketches. It was a decision that was made on-the-fly while I was doing each sketch, and it wasn’t until I compiled them together in this post that I realised I’d varied the sketching style for each one, to create sketches with a mix of black and white and colour.

Urban Sketching Styles

I love ink-only sketches or ones that I only use monochromatic tonal shading. But I also really love using bright colours. The more I sketch, the more I’m discovering how to combine both into a successful sketch. Mixing these sketching styles together can be really effective for creating depth and an area of focus.