Sketch from Photo: Watertaxi in Cabanas

Day Thirty-Six of my 365 Day Sketch Challenge

Continuing with day 36 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. I’ve been watching old episodes of Landscape Artist of the Year, and even though the subjects they’re painting aren’t ones that would inspire me. The fact of watching creatives create, has been some great motivation to find subjects I do want to paint.

On one of the episodes, there was an urban sketcher who won his heat, Brain Ramsey. His ink sketching style is fabulous, and it got me thinking about all the photos I’ve taken over the years, that I’ve never got around to sketching.

Sketch from My Photo

Last year I took a photo of two people sitting in front of us in a water taxi leaving Cabanas Beach and heading back to the mainland. In the distance is the edge of Cabanas and the Fort on the hill. I intended to sketch it, but never got around to it.

I’m beginning to get comfortable with my natural illustrative style, which is less realistic than I used to strive for. I’m also learning to release my grip on the need for perfectionism – although that lesson is sometimes tough to embrace!

Using Expressive and Continuous Lines

I did a series of sketches of a young boy on day 24 of this challenge, which was far from perfect, but one of the postures I captured was in a very loose and expressive style. It’s difficult to get that same level of expressiveness when you’re sketching from photos. So it’s important to try and inject each sketch with a modicum of loose lines, so that you can depict the scene with a noticible level of expressiveness and liveliness.

In this water taxi sketch I tried to use as much continuous line as possible. This is my default sketching style I like to use for foliage, whether I’m sketching from life or from a resource image. But don’t always think about using it for people sketches.

Creating Depth in this Sketch

I used a triad of primary colours (red shirt, blue shirt, yellow hats) for the people’s clothing, so that they were obviously the focal point. Then I used combination mixes of these colours to create muted colours for the buildings and foliage in the background.

The sketch would have benefited from using more line weight variety between the foreground and background, or maybe even just using watercolour for the background with no ink lines, to really make the figures jump out.

I sketched this scene, because I think it’s a good composition for a larger framed sketch, so will probably play around with line weight and watercolour-only areas to increase the level of depth in the scene.

Boatober Last October

I’ve been sketching framed pictures of local boat scenes recently, because I got inspired by my month of the Boatober challenge hosted by Doug Jackson. Each day he posted a boat photo, and we sketched it in our own style.

Working Towards A Looser Sketching Style

I wanted to use Boatober to loosen up my style, but I actually ended up doing quite detailed and specific sketches. It was through that challenge that I considered whether i should just embrace my more detail style, or really push to move towards a looser style. I realised I could spend years chasing a style that I have to really work at, or just embrace what comes naturally.

I’m on the fence about this still. But I may be slowing coming to the conclusion that the sketching situation may have to dictate the style I use. When I’m sketching from reference photos, it’s easier to use a style that is tighter and not so loose. Whereas when I sketch people from life, the immediacy of the situation dictates that your likes have to be quick and loose. So maybe I just need to use a situation-specific style.

The trouble is, when I see urban sketchers that sketch in a loose and expressive style, I’m really drawn to their art. But maybe just because I like that style, doesn’t mean that I should be trying to emulate it?