urban sketch at the cafe
Day One Hundred and Twenty-Five of Sketching People
Continuing on with day 125 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Urban sketching at a café in Tavira by the market, and at a café in Cabanas as the Spring market.
Urban Sketching People in Tavira
It was the vintage and flea market in Tavira today, and I test-drove my new urban sketching set up in preparation for the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Toulouse. I’ve been looking for a small flip top tin as the last addition to my sketch easel board – and found a perfect specimen at one of the flea stalls. Couldn’t be more perfect. It’s dual purpose, as it fits all my stubby watercolour pencils for transport, but then can be converted to a pen holder while I’m sketching. I’ll create a post soon with my new urban sketching set up.
Usually I come to Tavira Market and just sketch without much planning, but today I wanted to be more mindful of page composition and layout, and sketch shape. Not all of them were successful attempts, but at least I was considering my options a little more. I feel like I haven’t been doing enough urban sketching recently, so today was an opportunity to do a double-dose of sketching in two different locations.
I was having trouble with my Twisbi fountain pens today – they kept drying out and getting scratchy. I think I need to flush them and clean them with fountain pen cleaner, and see if that solves the problem. The ink has been in them a while, so maybe that’s the problem.
For the first sketch of the day I wanted to use an L-shaped layout. I wasn’t really warmed up yet, so not a great sketch.
Used buff titanium at the background because I wasn’t sure how to place him in the scene, the actual background was just too busy to sketch. My favourite part of this sketch in the cup and saucer! Another sketch that’s screaming out for a bit of poetic reportage.
Bit of a layout fail on this second sketch, but I do like the sketches of the people themselves, and created a connection between the two with colour, but some form of overlap would have improved the composition. I added coffee stains at the end because the figures looked a little lost on the page. This layout is screaming out for a bit of reportage or short stanza.
Another attempt at two unconnected figures in the same sketch, and this time I overlapped them. I think this works so well because it’s one front view figure and one back view figure. I used the green as the key colour on both figures to create a connection through colour harmony.
Urban Sketching People in Cabanas
There was a Spring Art Fair in Cabanas today, so I plotted up at one of the cafe tables and sketched people at neighbouring tables. Not an ideal set up, because the table choice was limited.
I’d finished my square small format sketchbook, so switched to an A5 sketchbook, and I ended up with quite a lot of white space in the sketch. So I grabbed inspiration from some bunting that was hanging in a different part of the cafe, and inserted it into the scene. I used paler versions of the colours used in the clothing for the bunting to tie them all together.
Liked the V-shape created by the sketch. There was another person in the gap, but I decided not to draw them in order to create that V-shape with negative space. I added a short poem, but it wasn’t very inspired – and they really should all be smiling, but I sketched them all frowning. Nobody looks happy, when in reality they really were having a good time. Something to bear in mind when I do my next group sketch.
Definitely feeling a little rusty in these new locations. I’ve got quite comfortable sketching people at the cafe at the end of our street, but as soon as I tried these less-familiar locations, I felt a little uneasy about sketching.
There’s nothing else for it, I need to up my urban sketching output to get as much practice as possible sketching people before Toulouse.
Composite Sketch from Today’s Tavira Photos
I took a load of different people photos today, so I have some photo references to do sketching at home when I don’t feel like venturing out. I created this composite from 4 different sketches, to combine different people I’d photographed, bits of a stall, and a tree.
Before I added the tree, this scene had an L-shaped feel to it. But then I threw that dynamic off by adding the tree in the background. I used neutral colours for some of the clothing, which helps to decrease the busyness in this scene.
