Urban Sketch at Tavira Mercado Cafe

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Day Forty-Seven of Sketching People

Continuing with day 47 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. The first warmish sunny day for god knows how many weeks, so took the opportunity of doing a spate of urban sketching at the Saturday second hand market, the Tavira Mercado, the cafe outside the market, and in the Uber going to and from the market.

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Urban Sketching my Uber Drivers

I’ve started to sketch my uber rides, because what better way to warm up my sketching muscles and get comfortable with creating wobbly lines. There’s plenty of roundabouts and speed bumps along my journey to keep my pen jumping.

Urban Sketching at the Second Hand Market

This was my first market sketch … and it was the Artist Corner sign that first caught my attention. I got busted sketching and the Mum came over to see what I was doing. They both loved the sketch. I mean … really loved it! Personally I thought it was crap. I was just warming up my sketching hand, and was feeling a little self-conscious – but just goes to show, that people love being sketched. I wish I’d done a better job though.

I asked the Mum where they were from, and I got a short history lesson about her family. I’m usually quite reserved about interacting with people I sketch, but they were so enthusiastic that it was an enjoyable experience. So I turned the sketch into a bit of reportage to capture who they were and what they said.

I recently discovered the art of Portuguese Urban Sketcher, Nelson Paciencia. He peppers his urban sketches with people sketches and snippets of overheard conversations. It’s not a style of reportage I’ve done very much of, but thought this busy Saturday market was a good place to experiment with it.

It was actually quite fun collecting the overheard conversations of the people I was sketching, and the snippets I heard from other passersby. My faves are “I’m looking for a little axe”, and “I wish I hadn’t sold my Toyota”. It’s wonderful how these banal fragments can be so intriguing.

I usually try hard to sketch what I see, but tune the background noise and conversations out. But today I realised how many French people there were in Tavira. It seemed like they outnumbered the Portuguese I heard, or maybe they were just talking louder. Lots of British and Scandinavian accents.

After trying to sketch people wandering around, it was nice to find a stall holder who was engrossed on her phone. So much easier to sketch the proportions accurately, when people are sitting still.

I didn’t want to sketch all the feet in the background, so I just dapped in a blue sky background. And added tonal shading to the rest of the sketch, with a spot colour for the phone. The phone was her focal point. So I made it mine for the sketch too.

The adults in the following sketch were chatting to another person, who was telling them “I’m looking for a little axe”. The conversation was taking a while, and all the time, the little boy was pulling at his mum and saying, over and over and over again, Mum. Each time getting louder and louder. She just ignored him.

I can’t believe I managed to sketch all three of them. Thank goodness for long conversations.

I wish I’d captured the following market shopper from the front, him and the child he was carrying, both looked like they were dragged through a hedge backwards. Hair all over the place. I didn’t quite manage to capture the full effect from the back. But I was happy they were spending so much time at the secondhand toy stall, because his stance was so expressive. Captured with a gesture sketch in pencil, and refined and finished off at the cafe.

Urban Sketching at the Municipal Market

Great little trio clustered around the garlic sellers stall. I’ve been trying to capture people with non-static poses. Where their weight is on one leg, rather than equally across both legs, which creates a static and boring pose to sketch.

I wasn’t too successful with the sketches of the guys, but I did capture a good stance for the lady. It’s the combination of one leg in front of the other, and the higher bum cheek on the weight bearing leg. And accentuating the folds in the in clothing.

Saw these two people ladened down with bags. Can’t have been much fun lugging all of those around. I chose to do a tonal sketch and added spot colour on all of the bags to make the bags, not the people, the focal point.

I sketched two people at the market, but then couldn’t spot anyone else I wanted to add to the sketch. So when I was at the cafe later, I added a few more people to the sketch. But added them in at tonal sketches, so the scene didn’t look too overwhelming and busy.

On the way out of the market I saw a cluster of people around one of the herb and spice stalls. They were huddled quite close together, so I did a quick gesture sketch to capture them all, using a lot of continuous line. I wanted to sketch quickly before they moved away. I added a bit of tonal shading for definition, but wanted to leave this as a simple tone and line sketch.

Kudos from MOH on this sketch, it was his fave of the bunch. Which surprised me. But he likes the loose lines.

Urban Sketching at the Café

After all this walking around, it was time to plot up at the café to finish off and paint my market scenes, and then sketch some of the café customers.

There was a group of French people at the adjacent table. And then I noticed how many different signs there were in my peripheral vision, so I just started adding them. I was just going to add three, but then I just kept going and going. The café we were in is located in loja 10, so I added that one in as well. Another tonal sketch, with some spot colour on the signs, and also the ear-ring and hat strap.

After the French group left the table, a man in his orange coat came and sat down. I started sketching, and somehow I created a sketch with a warped perspective, as if I was looking up at him. This resulted in him getting a smaller proportioned head. What initially attracted me was how his hand was angled over his knee, and I ended up sketching it oversized.

There’s an artist called Emma Petitt who draws large portraits of figures (not urban sketching) where the figures legs, feet, and hands are large, and out of proportion to the rest of the body, and the heads are small.

I didn’t intentionally sketch this man out of proportion. I started sketching his jeans and hand first, and then worked up the body to sketch it, but didn’t want to run out of space, so his upper body funnelled to a point and was topped with a small head.

I like how this turned out. It’s full of character. I do love those oversized hands. I wanted to give the sketch a sense of place, and was initially going to draw his iconic looking French wife, but I didn’t want to ruin this sketch, so just did a little pencil sketch of a cake, and coffee cup. It sets the scene, but doesn’t distract from the figure.

This gent below was sitting at a table the other side of me. To begin with he had his phone under the table and was trying to read it with the shade of the table, because the sun was bright. He was hunched over and it was such an interesting pose. But then he changed position.

So I had to settle for this pose instead. I took into account the interesting results of the warped perspective of my last sketch, and tried to do the same here. But the head wasn’t as out of proportion as it could have been, so the impact of the perspective was diluted.

But I added the requisite large hand playing with a phone. I predict there will be many more large hands in my further sketches. Not all of them of course, but where the hand grasping the phone or the hand gesture is the main focal point, an oversized hand is a welcome addition.

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Recap of my Urban Sketching Day

There is such variety in the people at the second hand market, the municipal market, and at the café. There is absolutely no shortage of figures to sketch. And on a day like today, when the sun was shining, it was a great day to sketch.

My Art Materials

I sketched with my Noodlers flex nib pen, with a home-made mix of urban grey and black ink. I wanted a dark grey, but it wasn’t quite dark enough. So I’ll keep experimenting with ink mixing to create a darker grey. My fountain pen ran out of ink – so much sketching! So I switched to a Staedtler pigment liner 0.1. For tonal shading I used Tombow brush pens N96, N89 and N65.

Sketching Style

I’m still in my experimentation phase with reportage, and also trying to develop a consistent style of sketching. Each urban sketch adventure is a journey of discovery, and today I realised that I love creating tonal sketches, or sketches with partial tonal areas and spot colour. I played around with using this tonal approach to help create or elevate a focal point.

I also played fast and loose with reality and used a lot of bright colours. Believe me, the people of Tavira aren’t this brightly clothed! But I had a lot of lime green in my palette, and mixed some bright and happy colours to complement it.

Now that the weather seems to be improving a little, I think more market visits will be in my future.

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