Blind Contour Speed Sketching
Day Thirty-One of Sketching People
Continuing with day Thirty-One of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Today I experimented with different pens and sketching styles, and attended three different live drawing events. A fun packed day of sketching.
Dylan Sara 10 Minute Daily YouTube Sketch
Back in December, Dylan hosted a 10 live sketch event on YouTube every morning at 9am GMT, and after a quick break for the holidays, he’s back doing these great live portrait sessions again.
I had a go at a 10 minute portrait, and because I don’t paint many portraits with non-white skin tones, I wanted to sketch the portrait again, and take a little bit more time with it.
To get away from my reliance on using the same ink pen, I used watercolour pencils for both of these sketches. And added some watercolour for the backgrounds, clothing, and some of the skin tone. It was enjoyable to mix the watercolour pencils with watercolour, and I’d like to do more of it.
Drawing is Free Speed Sketching
Chloe hosts the usual Monday speed sketching event (that I attended yesterday), but as her attendance numbers maxed out at 500 on zoom last week, she decided to celebrate with an extra session this week on Tuesday. Today’s session was a little different, in that Chloe directed the poses, and suggested the art materials.
I didn’t follow the directions exactly. I mainly used ink. But when she suggested that the first few sketches should be continuous blind contour, I got on board with that. I experimented with my 0.05 fine liner, my Uni-ball Eye, and my Sailor Fude fountain pen.
I think for this rough continuous blind contour style I prefer the delicate lines created by the 0.05 fine liner. Even if you restate a lines multiple times, it doesn’t look too heavy on these messy sketches. Whereas the portraits I did with the thicker ink pens, have a clunky chunky feel to them, that I’m not really a fan of.
I did the ink lines during the pose time constraint, but added pencil colouring after the pose session had ended.
Blind Contour Portraits with my 0.05 Fine Liner
I was really happy with the way these fine liner blind contour sketches turned out. There’s some interesting poses, and a lot of expressiveness in these portraits.
Expressive Hand Sketch
The gesture of the hand in this sketch of Janine is so expressive. I was just saying yesterday how much I was enjoying sketching hands. I’m impressed I sketched what I saw, and it turned out so dynamic.
Expressive Face Sketch
Artras is my favourite portrait sketch. It has a real “fed up” feel to it. Such expressiveness in the way the hand is distorting the layout of the face and shape of the eye.
This sketch has motivated me to do more blind contour and continuous line. Here’s the other one’s I did during this session. I added in some coloured pencil highlights on these, because they were only small and I had some time left during the pose.
Blind Contour Portrait with my Uni-ball Eye Fine
I only did one portrait with this pen, because I didn’t like the heaviness of the line for this style of sketching. It’s a loose style of sketching, but that heavy line weight doesn’t compliment that looseness.
I’m not too keen on how that face turned out, but I did like that pair of hands overlapping.
Blind Contour Portrait with my Sailor Fude
I rolled out the Tombow shading greys for these sketches. The first pose was looking up, so there was really extreme foreshortening, but all the features ended up in the right place. Probably because it was a blind contour sketch, which made this viewpoint easier.
Very odd nose, but again, a lovely expressive hand. I also like that there’s a gap in the line on the left hand side of this sketch. It wasn’t intentional, but I like when these sketches have an open feel to them because of broken lines.
Sketching with Dylan
Tuesday is the live 2 hour zoom event of Sketching with Dylan. This is a chatty group, and I’m more comfortable just sketching. So I sit on the sidelines happily scribbling away and listening. Two hours is quite a long time to concentrate on portraits, although there is a short break in the mid-point.
I created a grid layout to use for the shorter poses, to encourage me to limit the size of my sketches. I didn’t think this is what I’d end up using my Scoring Board for, but it’s really hand for creating quick grids, without having to mess around with a rule and pencil.
The 4 and 6 minute poses are more fun to do. And after the zoom event I added some watercolour backgrounds to these portraits.
I ran out of space on my grids, so ended up using some of the small squares that I’d recut. Because these are longer sketches, I’d have preferred to have larger cards to sketch on.
This was a lot of sketching today. I’m not sure if I’d take part in 3 hours of speed sketching again in one night! But it was good to experiment with different materials and styles.
