A Page of Portraits from tonight’s Drawing is Free session
Day One Hundred and Thirty-Five of Sketching People
Continuing on with day 135 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. I attended the Monday afternoon session of Drawing is Free speed sketching on Zoom.
Drawing is Free Speed Sketching Portraits
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. Today, first sketch and last sketch was of the session was Chloe the organiser, and the other models were chosen at random from the Zoom call attendees.
I think my favourite is the lady in the green top.
Size Matters
I forgot to plan for my speed sketching session, so had to grab some random strips of watercolour paper from my scrap bin. These off-cuts were actually a good size to sketch on (about 5cm tall), and being in a strip, they were easier to handle than the small oblongs I used in my last speed sketching session.
I’m glad I’ve started to use these speed sketching sessions to capture smaller portraits, because this makes the practice ideal for when I’m out and about doing urban sketching – especially in my A6 sketchbook. I’ve been doing a lot of single people sketches on a page with a short poem. These are really inspiring for me to do, and don’t take too long to complete.
I was talking with a fellow sketcher the other day, and we’re both going to the Urban Sketcher’s Symposium in Toulouse next month. And we’ve been contemplating which size sketchbooks to take. I usually use A6 and A5 sketchbooks, but I briefly considered taking an A4 sketchbook, because so many urban sketchers use large sketch and watercolour books of this size. But honestly, I find a page that large, a little overwhelming. Yes you don’t have to sketch one large scene per page, you can sketch a lot of vignettes, but they take planning, and I’d rather just grab my smaller sketchbook and start sketching. So all I’m packing is these two smaller formats. Now I just need to decide which paper I want to sketch and paint on – 100% cotton, or not?
