Urban Sketch and Conversation Capture at the Cafe

Day One Hundred and Seventy-Four of Sketching People

Continuing on with day 171 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour, back at home and out at the cafe for a quick coffee and a sketch.

Urban Sketching at the Cafe

Sketching is all about observation, and my first sketch after returning from our holiday was all about looking and listening. While sitting at a waterfront cafe beside a large group of people, who were all chatting animatedly, there was one voice that that kept caught my attention. So I sketched him and then captured some of his dialogue.

Capturing Dialogue

Often with these observational sketches, I rush to write down what’s being said, even when the dialogue doesn’t resonate or have much interest. And by the time something interesting is being discussed, I’ve run out of page. But this time around I was patient, and just sipped my coffee and drank in my surroundings, and waited for some verbal nuggets to fall … and fall they did.

If the page only had a sketch on it, the only clues you have to someone’s personality or mood is visual. You can assess body language or facial features, and come to some conclusions. But as soon as you add text to a sketch it reveals another layer of awareness about the person being sketched.

Formatting the Speech Bubbles

There were three different snippets of conversation captured in the sketch, but seven speech bubbles. So I grouped the conversation together by connecting multiple bubbles together, and only used one speech bubble tail to point towards the speaker, for each conversation snippet.

This approach means that you don’t have too many speech bubble tails pointing towards the speaker, which can be distracting. But this layout and organisation also makes it easier to identify that there’s three distinct conversations. I got this speech bubble tip from Dan Archer, when I shared one of my sketches with him in Instagram, and this organisational tip for speech bubbles is something I’m going to leverage in sketches going forward.

Colour Harmony in the Sketch

Initially the speech bubbles just had black lines around the text, but I wanted them to have a stronger connection to the sketch. So I added a loose border shapes to the bubbles and added the same yellow I’d used for the chair.

At some point more people joined the group, and said hello to my subject and I got to know his name. I added it at the top of the sketch, which visually becomes a focal point. From this point, there are three different paths for your eye to travel down the sketch: the figure, or the two conversation paths. I like that the yellow elements create a protective arch over the sketch, which culminates at the chair.

Capturing the Pose

When people are seated, their posture can sometimes look stiff and uninteresting, but I like that this profile view of his posture looks like he’s melting into his core and folding into himself. I also like that the sketch has a distorted perspective so that his hands and lower body look oversized, compared to the size of his head.