Day One Hundred and Twenty-Nine of Sketching People
Continuing on with day 129 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. Urban sketching people in Tavira and some small-scale portrait practice at home.
Urban Sketching People
It was a scorcher in Tavira this afternoon, so I headed for some shade in the park, and spied this bald man relaxing against the bench and watching the world go by. There was plenty of elements in the background of this scene like palm trees, statues and the railings along the river, but I wanted to keep the sketch simple so I just added the flowers to help to add a sense of place. I also used the flower to create an L-shaped page composition. I attempted to mirror that L-shape with the layout of the two line poem, but I’m not sure if this text helps to reinforce the layout, or is just plain distracting.
Lots of shops and cafes were shut, but I found one I haven’t been into before that was open, but there was only one other customer sitting in the corner. The wall behind him was boring, so I “moved” the framed football shirt from another wall over to my scene to add some context. It’s the shirt of Joao Nevez who’s a local boy who now plays for PSG.
Even though there’s quite a lot going on in this scene with the plant, and table and framed shirt, this sketch still felt a little sedentary, so when I got home I added a couple of lines of text to add some poetic reportage. Even though it’s only a couple of lines, I think this little bit of social commentary adds another layer of interest to an otherwise uninspiring sketch.
Portrait Practice
My Twisbi pen has been giving me a bit of grief recently, so I emptied it and have been soaking the nib in pen cleaner hoping that it’ll make it flow a little better. It’s calligraphy pen week in Dylan’s Expressive Portraits course and so I was giving my parallel pen a whirl, but that was also giving my grief and I ended up dusting off my fude nib pen for this set of portraits.
I didn’t use the pen to its full potential. It’s the ideal pen when you want to sketch ink lines with varying line weights, and I struggled a bit to add the heavier lines, because I’m not sure it’s a look that I like. Maybe it’s because I’m so used to sketching with a regular ink pen, that using this pen that creates expressive ink lines is alien to my style. But I think it would be good to do a bit more experimentation with these varying ink lines.
