Urban Sketch of a Couple at the Cafe

Day 65 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. A quick urban sketch in my village of Cabanas.

Urban Sketching at the Cafe

Some day’s it’s easy to feel like you don’t have any time to sketch, but maintaining a daily sketch habit is essential for improving and developing your sketching style. So today, even though I was short on time, I went down to the cafe at the end of my street for a coffee, and told myself to sketch just one sketch. There weren’t many people in the cafe when i got there, just this couple in front of me. But I like that they both had hats on, and she was chatting away, and he was just gazing off into space. I sketched them, but the page looked incomplete and I didn’t know what else to include on the page.

I ordered a coffee and a scone, and decided to sketch my scone to experiment with the page layout composition of two individual elements on a page. Then a neighbour arrived and saw I was eating a scone, and say .. you can take the girl out of the country … in reference to me eating a scone. We chatted, and then I packed up my sketchbook, paid for my coffee and left.

Much later I revisited my sketch page to add watercolour, and decided to convert the blah! sketch of the duo into a little bit of reportage. I added the comment from the neighbour, and an imaginary question from the woman.

Improving the Composition and Conversation

It’s quite usual in Urban sketches to rearrange objects and elements within the sketch to create a more pleasing composition. As long as you’re remaining true to the essence of the scene – moving a signpost, or repositioning people is something a lot of artists do. But this is the first time I’ve invented some conversation, or morphed a snipped of conversation into the scene. But by doing this, I’ve transformed a blah! sketch into a tiny story on a page, and captured the essence of the situation which is that we’re in a foreign country, but scones and clotted cream are on the menu.

I think it’s something I’d do again. I mean, who wants a sketchbook full of boring sketches! This conversation interaction wasn’t real, but I captured my own improved version of reality in this sketch, and what could have been a sketch I plastered over with a blank piece of paper, is now a memory captured.