A Page of Portraits from tonight’s Drawing is Free session

Day One Hundred and Thirty-Two of Sketching People

Continuing on with day 132 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, and also sketched the Earthsworld Challenge portrait via Facebook.

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 even took a spin being portrait model today during the session.

Continuing to use a Sailor Fude for Portraits

At last week’s Drawing is Free speed sketching session I switched to sketching portraits with my fude pen to add some line weight diversity to my sketches, and I’ve continued to use it all week. The hair is a great area for adding some extra weight to the ink lines based on where the shadows and denser area of hair is, but also where the hair meets the face. The darker areas around the face help to add some depth and division between the face and the hair.

Limiting the Size of my Portraits

Just recently I’ve been cutting my watercolour paper in smaller shapes for these speed sketching sessions, to force myself to sketch smaller. This makes the sketch practice more relevant for urban sketching. I’ve realised that if I have a larger area to sketch my portraits on – I’ll fill it. The whole goal of this portrait practice is to get me into the habit of minimising the number of lines I need to use on each portrait. This becomes easier to achieve if you’re sketching on smaller paper. And most of these pieces are around 3x5cm.

Using Hatching and Shading

I used Tombow water soluble pens for the shading, but I also added some highly diluted watercolour for the skin tones.

I’ve dabbled a bit with some hatching on some of these portraits, using the edge of the fude nib which creates really fine lines. I can’t decide if I want to continue to incorporate small areas of hatching or cross-hatching into my portraits, or if I want to give up on it. So it just keeps showing up every now and then, and I’m just going with it.

Drawing is Free Speed Sketching Portraits

I had a go at the daily portrait from the Drawing Earthsworld Challenge on Facebook today. I keep meaning to do this more regularly, but then I get side tracked. But today I was on hold with a call centre, which left me enough time, to sketch and add watercolour to the portrait.

I sketched this with the fude nib as well, but didn’t utilise the line-weight variety to make lines darker, but I did use the edge of the nib to sketch the flowers on the shirt with light broken lines. I really like the faded effect of these flowers, and I used diluted watercolour link on this turquoise shirt. Combined together, these add a layer of detail, without making it a focal point. The only area of the shirt that I used a full strength was on the collar, which helps to work with the hat to frame the face.