A Page of Portraits from tonight’s Drawing is Free session
Day One Hundred and Thirty of Sketching People
Continuing on with day 130 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 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 of each session is always of Chloe the organiser, and then she chooses people for us to sketch for the rest of the hour.
I had some offcuts of watercolour paper from some book binding projects I’m currently working on, so I let those determine what size of portraits I drew. None of these were taller than 8cm, and the widths ranged between 5cm and 12cm. My new goal for these speed sketching adventures is to practice the portrait sizes that I’d capture in my A6 sketchbook when I’m urban sketching.
Switching to a Sailor Fude for Portraits
I’ve been experimenting with my Sailor Fude pen as part of Dylan’s Expressive Portraits Class, he’s been using a pilot parallel pen for the calligraphy pen classes, but my one hasn’t been cooperating, so I switched to the Fude nib.
I usually sketch with an EF or F nib, and my favourite pen in my Twisbi, but I’m all for experimentation, especially when varying line weights has such an interesting liveliness to sketches. I want to see if adding heavier weighted lines works when you’re sketching portraits on a smaller scale. I’m asking myself if this sketching method something that would work for urban sketching.
Here’s some tentative steps on using the Sailor Fude pen. As soon as you add thicker lines to the portrait, that accentuates that area and it becomes a strong focal point. Some of the obvious darker areas on the sketch subjects occurs in their hair, especially around their face. These dark areas help to create separation between the shape of the face and the shape of the hair, and gives that meeting point a boost of depth.
Hatching for Shadow Areas
Ever since doing Dylan’s ballpoint pen classes, I’ve become slightly more interested in using hatching to denote tonal variances. It’s a bit clumsy looking in these portraits, but it does the job. I can’t decide whether I want to use hatching in my urban sketching, or if it’s just a sketching technique I want to toy with when I’m doing speed sketching.
In my second page of speed sketches from tonights session I started playing around with styles and elements to sketch. I was losing my concentration because it was a classical music soundtrack we sketched too, and it was very mellow.
Here’s some of my experiments:
- HAND: For one of the short poses, rather than trying to capture the face, I decided to just sketch the hand in the pose. I wanted to capture the pose of this hand and the tonal variances to give it depth, and this was two minutes well spent.
- PARTIAL FEATURES: On the next short pose I decided to just focus on the glasses and eyes, but I wanted to add a bit of the hair because I really liked how it was laying against her face. I like the look of this half-finished portrait sketch, and it’s something that I want to play around with more in future speed sketching events.
- PINK FACE: I drew in the shadow areas before adding in the hatching, and then added pink to those areas, and moved the paint around with clean water. This was a good exercise in identifying the big shadow shapes. I also added some hatching without identifying the shadow shapes first, and I prefer the look of those areas without the border line.
I’m enjoying using this Sailor Fude Nib, and I am going to keep at it for a couple more weeks to see if adding weighted lines to my portraits is something I want to keep. A good test will be to take this Fude pen out urban sketching and see if I like using it for sketching really quickly. One thing I do like is how delicate the hatching lines can be.
