Drawing Earthsworld Challenge Portrait

Day Seventy of Sketching People

Day 70 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. A quick sketch at the Pétanque pitch before my pen ran out of ink, and a couple of portrait sketches.

Walking back from a hair appointment yesterday I wandered past the Pétanque pitch and there were a couple of games in motion, so I had to stop and sketch a few of the poses.

Pétanque Poses in Motion

Pétanque players do a lot of standing around, and there’s also a lot of repetitive poses while they’re standing in the throwing circle. They change ends after each round, so you get alternating front and back views in alternative rounds. The winner is the first team to 13 points, so there’s plenty of time in each game to capture some poses. There’s all sorts of different ways to position for a throw, and throw the boule so it’s a good exercise in observation.

My technique for sketching these players was to start multiple sketches, and leave them partially finished, and wait for the player to get into a similar position again so I could finish the sketch.

I was looking forward to sitting and sketching for the entire match, but my fountain pen ran out of ink, so I had to make do with one page of sketches.

Here’s a sketch from my last Pétanque sketching session.

Each time I’ve sketched these players, I’ve used the some ink line technique. I think next time I’m going to take a brush pen and try to capture lines of action, to get a more expressive sketches. It might be time to work my way through Suhita Shirodkars Line of Action tutorial again.

Portrait Sketches

I think I OD’d a bit on speed sketching recently, and I haven’t participated in the Drawings Earthsworld Challenge on FB for quite a few weeks. But today the group host posted a photo of our fellow sketchers to sketch in our style. It was an interesting image that caught my imagination.

During my online Portuguese Lesson, there was a bit of delay to get started so I took the opportunity to sketch my instructor while he was getting the class materials ready.

It was a quick ink sketch, and a bit wobbly, but I really like how the watercolour skin tone turned out. There’s lots of layers and hard lines, and lots of tonal variety. I think he was a bit offended that I gave him green eyes and unrealistically vivid pink lips. So I had to explain that this was my version of reality, not actually reality. I do love playing that creative licence card.

These two portraits finished off my February/March A6 people sketches sketchbook. It usually takes me a month to fill one of these sketchbooks, but I started this book on the 14th of February, and finished it today. So just over two weeks. I think it’s proof that the weather has been warming up, and I’ve been outside urban sketching a lot more than usual.