Café Couple urban sketch and poem

Day One Hundred and Twenty-Three of Sketching People

Continuing on with day 123 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Urban sketching at the café when there’s only a couple of customers, and continuing my interest in biro portraits.

Urban Sketching People at the Café

Lovely weather today so headed down to my local café, but customers were few and far between so I had to sketch the display from the shop next door while I waited for customers.

The first people to arrive were a British couple – he in a flat cap. A bit overdressed for the weather we’re having, but he was wearing a holiday shirt. I sketched this couple and then added a short poem for a bit of reportage.

Another English couple arrived, but didn’t have very inspiring postures and they were very fidgety, so I had multiple attempts at capturing the woman’s profiled – not very successfully. All good practice though.

Finally a French couple arrived. I heard them talking in French about me using watercolour, so I flashed them my sketch page as I’d already started sketching the woman. The man was jumping up and down for ages, searching for a light for their cigarettes.

Finally he stopped somebody walking past the café who was smoking, and he was able to get a light from them. Then this couple puffed away like they were electing a new pope.

I can definitely see that I’ve lost a little bit of my speed and accuracy at sketching people quickly because I’ve been busy with my Expressive Portraits class and the Facial Features class. I’ve lost my way on urban sketching, and need to get back to it.

Biro Portraits

Talking about Expressive Portraits, I’ve been gripped by a fascination about doing biro portraits. This was the focus in last week’s class with Dylan Sara, and we’ve moved onto using a brush pen this week, but I sketched another couple of portraits in biro today.

Drawing Earthsworld Challenge on Facebook

I had a go at this woman’s portrait from the Drawing Earthsworld Challenge on Facebook today. His full face creates a lot of tonal variation and that’s what makes these portraits fun to capture in biro, because you can really get a lot of variety in pen strokes based on the lines weight and number of layers you use.

Sketching with Dylan 10 Minute Pose

This was Friday’s inspiration that I got around to sketching today. It’s part of Dylan Sara’s 10 Minute Poses sketching live stream on Youtube. He’s using a book of vintage photos, which includes a plethora of interesting portraits to sketch.

I’m getting comfortable in sketching eyes and lips using biro, but my noses need a bit of work. This main issue I keep repeating is noses being out of proportion with the rest of the face. They would be ok if they were too big, but I’m tending to sketch them too small. It was nose’s week in Dylan’s facial features course, and I had a bit of practice sketching noses, but I appear to need more!