Collection of urban sketches of people
Day One Hundred and Fifteen of Sketching People
Continuing on with day 115 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Quick sketches at the cafe using a water soluble fine liner for sketching and tonal shading.
Urban Sketching at the Cafe on Coffee Stains
I had some coffee-stained pages left over in my book from my coffee staining frenzy last month, and I’ve been waiting for the right time to use them. I was in a little Portuguese café today so flipped back in my book to find them and sketched on them.
Urban Sketch of Seated Man
I really liked this guy’s body posture, and did quite well getting it all on the page – except I cut one of his feet off … again! I only took two coloured pencils out with me, and used the purple inktense pencil for this guy’s clothes. Of all the colours in a palette, purple is my least favourite, and these inktense pencils are really vibrant.
I sketched him with my waterproof black ink pen, but in the flesh areas – I added lines from a brown water soluble fine liner, and then diffused the line into tonal shadow. This technique worked really well. Most of the brown lines disappeared and I was left with lovely subtle tonal shading.
Urban Sketch of Seated Woman
There weren’t a lot of people in the cafe when I first arrived, so I sketched this lady multiple times in this urban sketch study sequence. Initially she kept her same position, but in the last couple of sketches she changed her position a little so that I could see her profile.
I sketched her, and my next page of composite sketches, with the brown water soluble fine liner I used for Speed Sketching yesterday, and painted the lines with water to diffuse them and make the ink bleed.
For her hair I used the other pencil I’d brought with me – an Imperial Purple watercolour pencil, and I kept adding more lines into her hair with the fine liner to darken the tonal value, and desaturate the purple.
Collection of Urban Sketches of People
I was planning on sketching a cafe scene, but the people were so spread out that I ended up doing a disjointed composite sketch of overlapping figures. If they’d been more people at the cafe, I would have added them to this sketch to fill the page up more. I think there’s probably room for 3 or 4 more figures.
Sketching on Coffee Stains
I think the organic coffee-stained background works really well with this type of erratic composition. It works because the people are sketched with the brown soluble ink, and the background colour of the coffee stains creates an effortless colour harmony. Both the sketch and the background reflect that sense of disorganised chaos, and the coffee stains help to fill up the negative space without detracting from the figure sketches.
Speed Sketching with Pencils4Tea
I logged into the speed sketching session tonight hosted by Pencils4Tea, where every pose is the length of a music track. It’s been over a month since I attended this session, but I only stayed for a couple of the poses.
I drew these portraits with simple ink lines during the speed sketching session, and added watercolour afterwards. These look so gaudy and garish compared to the tonal sketches I did earlier in the day. Maybe I should consider using these speed sketching practices as an opportunity to practice simple ink lines and tonal shading rather than getting distracted by adding colour.
