Drawing Earthsworld Challenge

Day Thirty-Seven of Sketching People

Continuing with day 37 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. I managed a couple of quick portraits today. I did Dylan’s 10 minute portrait live stream on YouTube, the Sketching Earthsworld Challenge on Facebook, and then because I messed up the timezones and missed today’s Drawing is Free event, I painted a small sad self-portrait.

Dylan Sara 10 Minute Daily YouTube Sketch

This YouTube live stream hosted by Dylan is at 10am each morning for most of the week. But you can also look back on his historical broadcasts. I find it interesting to slow down the videos to half speed, and turn the audio off, and just watch Dylan sketch his lines. Today he drew Aldous Huxley.

Sketched in Watercolour pencil but no water used to blend it, and a water-based marker for the background.

I focused on the shadow shapes, but used hatching and cross-hatching instead of tonal shading. Don’t really like this approach of hatching, but I do like looking at the shadow shapes.

Dylan’s Aldous Huxley 10 Minute Portrait YouTube

Drawing Earthsworld Challenge

I did this old man’s portrait from the Drawing Earthsworld Challenge from Facebook. I’ve skipped this challenge for a couple of days, so it’s good to get back to it. They always have such interesting faces in this daily challenge, and now that we’ve entered a new year, it seems like the participation in this challenge has increased a lot.

Sketched in pencil first, and then ink, and added watercolour. To begin with it was a monochromatic sketch, but then I added brown eyes, which opened up the watercolour floodgates to add the flesh colours, and finally the turquoise background.

I went a bit heavy-handed on some of the ink lines, because I’m giving my Noodlers Flex Nib pen a test-drive, and I’m not quite used to the ink flow yet. But one of the lines is a style choice I told myself I wasn’t going to keep making, which is the heavy line under the bulge of the cheek. I’ve used those heavy lines in sketches before and realised it would be better use watercolour shading to show this area of tonal change, rather than a heavy ink line. The good thing about doing this daily sketching practice is because of the volume of faces in sketching, I’m becoming more aware of the style choices I make that don’t work. And I can come to a decision to change how I approach sketches, much quicker.

I like the looseness of the plaid shirt. Those are one of my favourite articles of clothing to sketch. The best approach for sketching the is the looser the better – with the lines and the colouring and shading.

Small Self-Portrait

I was planning on joining the Drawing is Free speed sketching session tonight, but I got the timezone mixed up, and missed it by an hour! I was patiently waiting for the zoom to start, and when I realised I’d missed it, I noticed my small reflection on my screen, and sketched my sulky face!

So mad I missed this session. I was sitting there with my Noodlers pen and a fineliner, and a gridded out sheet of watercolour paper – all ready to go!

For a summary of weekly speed sketching session online, check out my roundup post.

Envelope Method

I watched a bit of another people sketching video on YouTube today, and the presenter discussed how she had dumped the Loomis method for sketching portraits and preferred to use the envelope method.

I hadn’t heard of this sketching approach before, but it basically consists of creating an ‘envelope’ around the whole shape using a series of straight lines. This creates a big block shape which is then refined.

The Envelope Method focuses on assessing proportions and distances, before diving into the details of your sketch. It piqued my interest, so need to do some more research on this approach to sketching.