Groups of people focused on hair shape
I recently watched Teoh Yi Chie’s Common Urban Sketching Mistakes video on YouTube, which covers some sketching mistakes he made when sketching buildings at a Aukland symposium. In it he also talks about his fast and slow approach to sketching groups of people – which was insightful and is going to be really helpful when I sketch groups of people in Toulouse.
About Teoh Yi Chie
Teoh is an artist who runs the parkablogs.com website and is also Parkablogs on Patreon. On Skillshare he’s Teoh. He’s attended multiple Urban Sketching Symposiums and has blogged about them, and shared videos of his symposium experiences on Youtube, where he also has a wealth of video about urban sketching and art material product reviews.
Quick Sketches of People
Click on this link to start his Quick Sketches video at the 13:44 minute mark, you can also read a summary of his input below.
In this section of the video Teoh mentions his habit of drawing quickly when time is of the essence, so in order to capture a likeness, he focuses on depicting these two elements so they’re recognisable and believable:
- Getting the shape and colour of the hair right
- Correctly depicting the shape and colour of the clothing
Sketching Hands
Depending on the situation, he’ll capture the head and the hands before he sketches the clothing, because the hands are usually always moving. As soon as the person looks like they’re placing their hands in a rested or static position, Teoh sketches them quickly, and then will connect the head and the hands with clothing.
He does this because it’s much easier to draw hands when you have a reference for them, whereas to sketch clothing you can rely more heavily on your imagination. And it’s much easier to capture believable clothing positions with a few quick strokes.
Facial Features
For facial features he uses a very stylised approach that is very cartoonish, and doesn’t worry too much about capturing a likeness. Eyes are just dots, or small “u” or “v” shapes, and similar marks are used for the tip of the nose and the mouth.
Painting Loose
Teoh applies watercolour in a very loose style, and isn’t concerned about keeping the paint within the lines. He also doesn’t always wait for the paint to dry in neighbouring areas, and just lets the colours bleed together. He calls this a mistake, but I think sometimes that can add another layer of looseness to these quick people sketches.
He makes sure to include highlights based on the direction of the light source, which you can achieve by painting quickly and not worrying about painting up to the lines.
Slower Sketches of People
Click on this link to start his Slower Sketches video at the 16:49 minute mark
In this section of the video he reviews a sketching session of a meeting that went on for a long time, so he had more time to study the facial features. Although these features are still stylised there’s more character displayed with the expressions, and the simple facial features are placed more thoughtfully to represent reality.
