Composite sketch of people in the waiting room at the medical centre

Day One Hundred and Seventy-Five of Sketching People

Continuing on with day 175 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour, during my visit to the mall to sketch at the medical centre and the cafes.

Urban Sketch at the Cafe with a Quote

I spend a lot of time in cafes alone … sketching. There’s always loads of people to choose from to sketch, but I can’t just sketch anyone – there has to be something that entices me to choose a person to sketch. In this case it was the stripes. I’m a sucker for them, and sometimes I even add stripes when the clothing the person is wearing is dull and uninspiring.

As well as her striped dress, I loved that this woman was sitting in a bubble of solitude. Quietly enjoying her drink, and gazing into space. Was she lonely, or just enjoying the opportunity of being alone? There was space on the page and I had intended to write a short poem, but ended up searching online for quotes about enjoying being alone. There’s such a stigma about being alone, but it doesn’t have to mean you’re lonely, and I wanted a quoted that celebrated or acknowledged the beauty of taking time for yourself.

Last month I signed up for Willa Wanders Love Your (Imperfect) Letters, which is an online lettering course about designing a personal, handwritten font and building the muscle memory to use it naturally and consistently in your mixed media art. I think it’s aimed at collage and multi-media artists, but it’s just as relevant for sketchers like me who want to add consistently prettier looking text to their sketches.

In a precious analogue life chapter, I was a freelance calligrapher in London who mastered the art of inscribing certificates, name cards, and invites in my fancy handwriting with my fancy pens. But then desktop publishing happened and the same effect could be done by personal computers, and so I stopped.

I’ve always loved the art of handwriting and have more than a passing interest in graphology.and still enjoy handwriting correspondence. I’m not interested in incorporating calligraphy into my sketchbook, but I love the idea of combining sketching and text. Over the years my handwriting has become scruffy and lazy – I think my head works quicker than my hand, and my pen can’t keep up! So I enrolled in the Imperfect Letters course to help me develop a handwriting style that is consistently predictable. If, like me, you have an obsession with fonts, the best site is Creative Market. Over the years I’ve downloaded a multitude of fonts from them, especially during my years of running my Birds of a Feather Press imprint, but more recently I’ve been using it as a resource to develop my Imperfect Letters. My goal isn’t to redefine my handwriting, it’s to take my existing natural handwriting style and add some polish and a little more consistency to each letter. It needs to feel natural to create, so that it becomes distinctively mine and repeatable.

The quote on my cafe lady sketch page is one of my early attempts at combining different text sizes onto a page. I’d definitely like my letters to be a little less imperfect than this attempt, but we’re moving in the right direction.

Urban Sketch at the Medical Centre

Like most public places in Portugal, you have to pick a number and wait your turn, whether that’s at the stationary shop, the chemist, the fish counter at the supermarket, or at the medical centre. I duly took my number for my visit, but got so engrossed in my sketching that I missed my turn and had to pick another number. It extended my waiting period, but at least it meant I had more time to sketch.

This turned into a bit of a journal page. I pasted in both of my tickets, and added some text about my missed turn. Rather than sketching a scene, I did a character cluster sketch of different people waiting their turn or being attended too. I really like creating these mash-up disjointed scenes, there’s usually not too much planning involved. I started off by sketching the seated lady with a covered head, and the rest of the sketch evolved from there. I like the up-down nature of the top row. It has the feeling of a W shape.

With so much going on in the sketch, I decided to keep it monochromatic, using black and grey to establish depth in the sketches.