Queue for the Toilet on the Plane
Day Seventy-Five of Sketching People
Day 75 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Off to visit the UK, I hit the ground running with lots of sketches at the airport and on the plane. This week is One Week 100 People, and today is the second day of this five day challenge.
Urban Sketching At the Airport
I’d emptied the ink out of my fountain pen, so used a fine liner for these airport sketches and sketched in an A6 landscape sketchbook.
I sketched in ink and added watercolour to them on location. I’ve been using a water brush more frequently when I’m doing my urban sketches because it’s good not having to juggle a water pot as well as a paint palette and sketchbook. But I much prefer using a proper watercolour brushes. I actually bought a set of Princeton Aqua Elite travel watercolour brushes recently, but haven’t used them yet.
Faro Departure Lounge Urban Sketches
This guy was engrossed in his phone, so was an easy first choice, and he was sitting directly opposite me, so the angles and perspectives weren’t too challenging. We had an early flight, and I thought it’d take me a couple of sketches to get into the groove, but he turned out well. MOH wrestled my sketchbook off me to show the guy his portrait, and he was happy with it and took a photo. A good souvenir to end his trip to Portugal.
This lady didn’t turn out too well. She was diagonally opposite to me, and I struggled with some of the perspective aspects. But it was a moment captured, and that’s what urban sketching is all about.
There was an abundance of doom scrolling and coffee drinking this early in the morning, so it was a good opportunity to sketch, but after the success of my first sketch, non of the others seemed to hit the mark. But all sketching practice is good practice. It’s good to look at sketches and assess what you’d do differently next time.
Urban Sketching On the Plane
I was in the front row of this flight to London, and we were right near the toilet. My first thought was “oh no!” – but it turns out that the queue for the toilet is a perfect place to sketch people. I also did a couple of sketches of people on the opposite aisle.
Using background boxes to create separation
Old big-hands in the row behind was a sleepy chap, so I just had to sketch him. He looked a little lost on the page, so I added one of my toilet-queue participants. To create some separation between these two scenes I added a background box around my seated figure.
This composition would have looked better if I hadn’t extended the grey background shading all the way across the page, and just kept it as a small area of shading to the left of the standing figure. This would have helped to keep the two figure separate. As it is, the composition is a little confusing.
Overlapping but still separate
I sketched the front row people across the aisle, and then added the lady waiting for the toilet. It looks like she’s being molested or pick-pocketed. This wasn’t intentional, but I actually like the look of it!
This composition works a lot better than my previous sketch. It helps to have the white area around the figures, which creates a feeling of separation between the individual scenes, even though they are overlapping.
Including the scene within the background box
This sketch below is another attempt at a composition that creates separation between two scenes. Part of the challenge with using such a small sketchbook (A6), is that it’s challenging to fit multiple scenes on the same page. So I’ve been experimenting with adding a loose background box behind one of the figures to connect figures or objects together.
In this sketch I added the toilet into the background box, and used the box to connect the figure to the scene. This approach might not work for every urban sketching scenario, but I think it works really well in this case. And I like how the toilet is conveyed here better than the previous two sketches, where I just sketched the toilet door in the background behind the person.
Creating a link between each of the toilet-queue sketches
For all of the toilet-queue sketches I enhanced the images on the toilet door to draw attention to it. The actual door just had monochromatic images of the male and female figure, but I coloured these in red, so that there was an obvious connection between all of these toilet-queue sketches.
Simplifying the background
This sketch includes a lot of the background of the plane exit. It was a chance to sketch something other than people, but of course I began the sketch by adding one of those into the scene before adding the background.
Backgrounds like this help to convey a sense of place, and it a good opportunity to simplify what you see and still adequately convey where the scene is set.
Single Urban Sketched Scene on a page
In this final toilet-queue sketch I added the door to the cockpit, so that it was obvious that the toilet was right next door and at the front of the plane.
This page has a single scene on it. These people weren’t all there at the same time, it’s more of a time-lapse view of waiting people. I thought I was done for the day, but then one more person lined up, and I loved her outfit, so had to sketch her, but she looks a little lonely on that facing page so I’m going to have to use the rest of that page for another sketch.
All-in-all a productive morning sketching. Good practice for sketching people from the back, but also for playing around with composition on these A6 pages. I’ve also brought an A5 sketchbook with me, so I think I’ll be switching between the two of these on the trip.
