Urban Sketches of a lady on a coffee stained page
Day Ninety-One of Sketching People
Day 91 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Another beautiful sunny day, so spent a couple of hours urban sketching people at the cafe to capture them in ink onto coffee-stained watercolour paper.
Urban Sketching at the Cafe on Coffee Stains
Today I had another go at adding coffee stains to my A5 watercolour paper. I usually take my A6 sketchbook out for cafe sketching, but today I wanted to have room for my sketches to breathe, so used the larger format.
For this first sketch I added the coffee stain afterwards, but for all the other sketches I added the stains before I sketched and let the coffee stains dry before adding ink sketches on top.
I only took my Twisbi Vac700 (F fountain pen) out with me, so I had to add the watercolour to all the sketches at home. I did toy with the idea of leaving them as ink lines, or just adding tonal shading with water soluable Tombow brush pens – I thought a nice warm grey would complement the coffee nicely, but I couldn’t resist adding watercolour instead … maybe next time I’ll Tombow them instead.
For this last sketch I ended up exaggerating the size of her head. It wasn’t intentional, I just sketched her body too small, but it still turned out ok. I specifically chose this page with a circular coffee stain to position her in front of.
Prepping my Coffee Stained Pages
On some pages I just did splashes of coffee, and others I used the bottom or top of my cup dipped in the coffee to create circles. I prepped more pages than I used, so I have five more pages to fill up during my next cafe sketch session.
I like the coffee stains to leave a pale impression. So after adding the coffee to the watercolour paper, I let it dry a little bit before dabbing the excess coffee off. I found that if I leave that coffee on to dry naturally, it creates a much darker effect
The coffee stains on my first sketch of the retired lady are a lot darker because I didn’t dab the excess coffee off. This sketch didn’t have much on the page, so I think the darker and more dramatic coffee staining works a lot better to complement the calmness of the sketch and tranquility of the pose.
Lapin and his big head portraits
There’s an artist called Lapin, who used this oversized head approach as his signature people sketching style – he calls them big head portraits.
He’s going to be hosting a workshop and demonstration at the next Urban Sketchers Symposium in Toulouse in July. Here’s his demo reel for the sessions:
