My Page of Portraits from tonight's Drawing is Free session

Day One Hundred and Twenty-Six of Sketching People

Continuing on with day 126 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. This week I attended the Monday afternoon session of Drawing is Free speed sketching on Zoom.

Drawing is Free Speed Sketching

Drawing is Free live sketching event is a one-hour speed sketching session, with each pose the length of a different music track, so each pose ends up being between 3 to 5 minutes. The first sketch of each session is always of Chloe the organiser, and then she chooses people for us to sketch for the rest of the hour.

Today I cut out smaller pieces of paper for my portraits. I’ve been doing larger portraits at part of Dyan Sara’s Expressive Portraits class, and haven’t been doing as much small scale people sketching.

I really felt the impact of this change in focus when I’ve been going out and sketching people recently. It felt like I’d lost the skill of sketching small and I was disappointed with my recent sketches, so tonight I cut pieces of paper in 5cm x 8cm oblongs to force me to sketch smaller. This is about half the size that I usually create for these speed sketching sessions.

I started some of the portraits too large, and ran out of space, because I was focused on capturing details instead of mapping out the main shape of the face to get the head in proportion to the space available.

These are my three favourite portrait sketches from the night. Strangely, we only sketched two men, and both of them made my top 3 list. The first sketch in this trio is the size of portrait I was aiming for.

These were my second tier of favourite sketches. Not so much for the quality of the portrait but for the higher contrast and use of negative space.

The darker tonal shading on the two outside portraits really helps to add depth to the portrait, and make the face more of a focal point. In the middle sketch, I like the balance of the dark tone on the bottom right against the negative space on the upper left.

Not bothered about any of these in my last tier, but it’s all good practice for sketching portraits. I like this smaller format, and I’ll use it again, but next time I need to create a contour line before attempting the features, so that I can get the face to fit the frame.

I used my Twisbi Vac700 fountain pen with grey ink, and a couple of shades of Tombow brush pen for the tonal shading. As much as I love colour, I really do like sketching in black and grey tones.

I’ve created a roundup post of online live portrait sketching events online. Click here to see your options.

Drawing with Dylan 10 at 10

I sketched along with Dylan today (10am German Time) for his ten minute daily sketch along live stream on YouTube, to create a portrait of Albert Einstein. Dylan used a parallel pen, but I didn’t have ink in either of my parallel pens so I just used a fineliner and used pointillism for shading and then some Tombow on top for a bit of additional tonal variety.