My favourite sketch from the live sketching night
Day Ninety-Four of Sketching People
Day 94 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. A few warm up sketches at the cafe during the day and at night, live sketching at a local art gallery at the opening of their new collage exhibition.
Warm Up Sketches at the cafe
I went out for lunch today at the Vitavims cafe. It was busy outside, so I sat inside by an open window so I could sketch the cafe patrons outside from that vantage point.
I started off by sketching three groups of two people.
Then sketched a boy right outside the window who was hyped up on Coca-Cola and playing video games.
On this second sketch I also added an inset picture of my lunch, it doesn’t look appetising, but it was delicious. I need more practice sketching my food!
After this cafe I headed home but saw a group of people in Bar 66 that I thought would be good to sketch, so sat down for a coffee and sketched the two guys on a coffee stained background. I was close enough to overhear their conversation so captured it as a bit of reportage.
Live Sketching
I’m really not one for crowds, but I wanted to attend the opening night of an art exhibition opening at the recently opened A Borboleta (The Butterfly) Art Gallery in Tavira. The exhibition is a group show of collage works by talented local artists.
Rather than mingle with a glass of wine in my hand, I had my new handmade watercolour book that I’d made especially for this occasion, and my Twisbi fountain pen with black ink.
I also took a paired down urban sketching kit which I’ve detailed at the end of this post.
The pages in my sketchbook are approx 8x8cm, so I started off by sketching head and shoulder portraits, but there were so many colourful outfits I wanted to capture that I switched to double-page spreads of full body sketches.
I love the warped perspective of this sketch of the lady with the check trousers. The head is small and the body gets closer in perspective as we travel towards the shoes, which makes the lower half of her body look longer and out of proportion.
I had to draw this vision in varying shades of green, how could I not? I was pleased to capture an array of frontal, profile, and back of the head sketches.
I had a go at adding some artwork to this sketch, but it was difficult to capture it quickly with enough detail to give an indication of what it was, but not so much that it became distracting.
I had intended to just do ink and tonal shading sketches, but there was just such a vivid array of colour I had to get my paints out. The only challenge with this is that I had to wait for a sketch to dry before I sketched on the next page.
Paining the people sketches live, is not an ideal situation, and it’d be better to just do the ink lines and tonal shading on the night, and colour the sketches at home. But then I feel you miss out on the opportunity to capture the colour organically and dynamically when you’re sketching live.
I have to figure a different way to handle this desire to add watercolour. Maybe two different sketchbooks, and alternate between the two. One drying, while sketching on the other one? Or would that be too much to juggle?
Art Galleries for Urban Sketching
Art gallery openings are a good place to sketch. They’re social occasions with people staying in one spot long enough to sketch them. Whether it’s people standing in front of art discussing it, or people chatting in small groups, there were plenty of opportunities to sketch individuals that caught my eye.
I wasn’t there on an official capacity, I was just an attendee that wanted to capture the night with my fountain pen. At one point I was sketching, and a guy came up and ordered a red wine – he’d seen my little book and thought I was taking orders for drinks! LOL!
My Paired down Urban Sketching Kit
As well as my sketchbook and fountain pen, I took the following:
- a tonal variety of grey Tombow dual brush pens (light, medium, and dark grey)
- a couple of beige Tombow’s
- a waterbrush
- my small travel palette
