Pencils4Tea Speed Sketching Event
This is one of the weekly speed sketching events on zoom, where each pose is the length of a song track. Tonight’s session was a celebration of Burns Night, so lots of Scottish tracks, and we were lucky that quite a few of them were long (around 5 minutes), which was a bit of a treat. They also played my favourite Paulo Nutini track, Pencils full of Lead. I first heard this song on Graham Norton sixteen years ago, and became an instant fan. This song is very apt for this speed sketching event – maybe it should be their signature tune!
I did the ink sketches with my finalise 0.05, and added some shading with my Tombow brush pens. I also added bit of spot colour on the lips and eyes with pencil during the poses, but added the background colours after the event.
This one-hour session whizzed by really quickly. Before you know it, you’re on your last sketch, and have no idea where the time went.
Grids for Speed Sketching
I started off sketching in a grid I’d pre-made. My main reason for doing these speed sketching events is practice for urban sketching people quickly, so I got it into my head that I needed to reduce the size of the portraits I was sketching during these timed sketching sessions.
But part way through tonights event, I realised that I wanted larger pieces of watercolour paper to draw larger portraits – mainly because of the longer time for some of the poses.
So I think for future speed sketching events I need to have a collection of different sized pieces of paper to sketch on, so as not to feel so constrained. Well, that’s how I’m feeling after this session, but no doubt I’m going to flip-flop back to reducing the size of my portraits again, at some point!
Creativity all about being open to change and being versatile, and not being too stuck in a rut about specific way of doing things. If you don’t explore and experiment, how can you grow and improve?
