Santa Luzia street scene

Lunch Trip to Santa Luzia

Busy day dealing with Portuguese bureaucracy so not a lot of time for sketching during the day. But after the bureaucratic day I needed a glass of wine and a change of scenery to buoy my mood, so we went to our favourite little eatery in Santa Luzia.

Tasquinha do Bruno is tucked down the back streets between two churches, and it’s a little gem. We always sit on the rickety little stools on the pavement, overlooking the Rua dos Pescadores. I didn’t have time to sketch, so I took a photo planning to sketch it at a later date. But after watching a lot of the Free Urban Sketching Course hosted by Ian Fennelly, it inspired me to pull-up the photo and sketch it tonight instead.

Planning my L-Shaped Composition

I really did think about my composition ahead of time, and had an L-shape in mind. I was going to have the palm trees on the far right and the focal building and the shorter building to the left of it on the right. But my photo wasn’t as panoramic as I thought it was, so I really didn’t have a lot of scene to play with. So I ended up using the tall house and trees at the vertical part of the L, and the house to the right as the horizontal part of the L. It’s a bit of a haphazard L shape, but from an interest level, it still works. It’s an L with interest.

Leaving Enough White Space on my Sketch

I sketched this in my A4 sketchbook, as I’m trying to get used to sketching on a bigger format, and also I want to have more negatives space and white around my sketches. When I sketch on A6 and A5, my sketches often feel confined and busy, because of the lack of white space.

Leaving enough white space is a good approach when you want to write notes about your sketches. I’m not always good about making notes about what I like and what I could improve, usually because I don’t have space on the pages – this is one of the advantages of using this A4 sketchbook.

Tip of Dynamic Skies

I’ve been doing more dynamic skies recently that I’ve liked the results of. I’ve realised the trick is to use more water, and mix and merge the blues on the page rather than in the palette. You don’t know what results you’re going to get, but if you have enough water on the page, it’ll allow the watercolour to create some magic. I’m actually making good friends with paint splashes and splatters too. I did gentle ones on this page, and they’re just as effective and smothering the page in splatters.

Tip for Dynamic but Believable Palm Tree Fronds

We have lots of different types of palm trees here in Portugal, and the fronts are usually a mass of visual confusion, so I usually just guess at the shapes. But on this sketch I really looked and the shape and direction of the fronds, and drew them loosely but a little slower and thoughtfully that I usually would. Then I just splashed on a couple different greens over the fronds, rather than trying to mimic the actual shape. This loose approach adds a level of liveliness that exists on these trees, and I’m going in the right directions to capture some of that movement (splatters help with that too).

See the palm trees I did at the public gardens in Tavira earlier this week. I wasn’t as thoughtful with the palm tree fronds on this earlier version, but I like the addition of the splatters and the green combinations I mixed on the paper.

Tonal Shading for Shadow Areas

I added tonal shading for all the areas that weren’t the front facing of the big house. On that big wall I just added shading under the bits of the building that had cast shadows. But I think I overdid this shading, and wish I’d left more of the house-front white to increase the impact of this focal area.

For all the tonal shading I used an N75 Tombow pen. I really like using these water soluble brush pens, because they create a gentle bleed when you add water. I’m going to experiment with water soluble fountain pen ink (as demonstrated in Toni Burk’s recent tutorial), but I think I’m favouring the more delicate and controllable approach of the Tombow. The jury’s still out on the best approach for adding shadows, but in the Ian Fennelly urban sketching tutorial (that I haven’t got to yet) he covers using a series of Tombow markers to add depth and shading to your sketch. Ian is the reason I bought my first Tombow all those years ago, so I’m interested to get a refresher on how he uses them.

Less is More – Go with your Gut

I sketched a motorbike that was between a sign and a palm tree. Initially I left it as an ink line sketch only, so it created a negative space between these two dark objects. But I crumbled, and ended up colouring it in with a dark grey Tombow pen, and regretted my decision. It looked so much better as an interesting negative shape. Whereas now I’ve ended up with a black blob, and an area of the sketch that’s a little visually confusing.

Next time I’m going with my gut. My first instinct was right, but I second-guessed myself because I thought it was right and better to sketch something closer to reality, when actually it would have been better to have something a little more abstract that added an extra element of interest.

Overall, I was really happy with this sketch, and am pleased that I took the time to evaluate what works and what I can do differently next time. I’d love to be able to churn these type of sketches out by painting intuitively. But to get to that point I need to work through this learning curve of sketching looser and more dynamic building sketches.