A Page of Portraits from tonight’s Drawing is Free session
Day One Hundred and Thirty-Nine of Sketching People
Continuing on with day 139 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.
Limited Colour Palette
I’ve been doing some Oliver Hoeller tutorials this weekend. I have his book “Pack your Sketches Full of Life“, and his tutorials are about mastering tonal values, so that you can use whatever colour you want in your sketches, and they are still believable and readable, even though the colours aren’t realistic. The role of colour is to provide a mood for the sketch, rather than depicting its reality.
One of the exercises in yesterday’s tutorial was about filling in small thumbnails using a limited colour palette, and not worrying too much about using realistic colours, or colour combinations. This is a great way to discover colour combinations that “speak” to you, so that you’re aware of your favourites where you’re urban sketching.
One of the approaches Oliver has for his sketchbooks, is he’ll use the same colour combination for a location, and then when he changes locations, he’ll adjust his colour palette.
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. The first sketch is Chloe the organiser, and the other models were chosen at random from the Zoom call attendees.
It was a last minute decision to join (I was busy sketching Beach Bums) – and I almost missed this session. I didn’t have any pre-cut pieces of watercolour paper to sketch and paint on, so I just grabbed the nearest watercolour pad and started drawing with my fountain pen, and then adding non-realistic colours in watercolour.
I ended up with a compilations of lots of different sized portraits, and I decided to continue the theme of using limited and unrealistic colour palettes for each of the portraits. I started using a colour triad of Indian Red, Cobalt Turquoise Light, and Potter’s Pink for the first couple of portraits, but then veered off in all sorts of directions. My last portrait is my favourite – it’s the green and yellow on in the bottom right hand corner.
Watercolour can take you off is so many interesting direction. It’s such a rabbit hole. I’ve been slightly obsessive about discovering colour triads that I think would be useful for urban sketching, and from there, exploring using a limited analogous colour palettes. All with the goal of achieving an effortless, but cohesive colour harmony on my sketch pages.
And now here I am, exploring a non-realistic limited colour palette, and realising that this is just one more interesting rabbit hole to lose myself down. I have a feeling that this voyage of discovery is limitless.
