Finiki Beach Harbour and Restaurants

Here’s a recap of the sketches I did while exploring and leaving Karpathos. The first batch of sketches were done in my new Stillman & Birn Alpha Series 14cm x 9cm sketchbook, which is even smaller than my favoured A6 landscape sketchbook. But I also took along an A5 sketchbook to capture some more detailed scenes.

I did some people sketches during my time on Karpathos, but I’ve included them in my Sketching People posts as part of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour, and here’s the link to look at these Karpathos people sketches.

Urban Sketching Finiki in my Small Sketchbook

There was a compact fishing boat harbour in Finiki, so I got up early-ish a couple of mornings to sit on the dock with my sketchbook to capture the scene. Lots of the boats were one-man size, and this little blue boat with the cross caught my eye. This was a warm up sketch for the larger scene of the harbour I sketched in my A5 sketchbook.

The Agios Nikolaos chapel was at the top of a slope overlooking the harbour. I started sketching it, and didn’t plan properly so ended up chopping the top of the building off. One of the challenges of switching to this smaller travel sketchbook, is that you really need to plan your sketch before you start sketching, but my usual approach is to just get stuck in. I still like this scene though.

There was a series of steps leading up to the chapel, between a couple of restaurants and some apartment buildings. These white steps are an iconic part of Greece.

From my apartment patio area I had an engaging view of the corner of the Delfini restaurant, and i had a couple of attempts at capturing it. I wish I’d taped these pages off to give them a border, so that there was some more white space on the page to give the sketch room to breathe.

On larger sketchbook pages it’s easier to leave a white border naturally, but in this smaller travel sketchbook it’s more difficult, especially when you’re trying to capture a scene with multiple elements. Before you know it, you’ve filled up the page, and it looks cramped. So I’m going to try to remember to apply a taped border around the edge of the page to force myself to leave more white space.

Our apartment was right opposite the fabulous Immakolata restaurant. I wish I’d sketched this at more of an angle rather than straight on. I’m becoming more adept at sketching small tables and chairs with minimal detail – for items like this, it’s all about using repeating patterns to give the impression of them rather than trying to get them accurately depicted.

Urban Sketching Finiki in my A5 sketchbook

The same morning I did the small boat study, I went to a different part of the harbour to sketch the boat from another angle and to capture the backdrop of the restaurants and harbour. I really like the composition of this scene, and that I used the strong colour palette in the foreground in the boat, and a muted limited colour palette with tonal shading on the background.

During the evenings this harbour area is swamped with people, but I love this time of day where people are few and far between. I was lucky that there was a couple of people taking an early morning stroll up to the chapel on the hill, and so I added them to the scene.

We stayed in the downstairs apartment of this little blue building, which is probably the most photographed building in Finiki. We had to get used to being photographed during our stay by random passer’s by. I had a couple of attempts at capturing its cuteness, and the surrounding street scene.

The first vantage point was straight on, which is a bit of a boring view. But for my second attempt I moved further round so I could capture a better angle, but also add the stairs that led up the hill.

For both of these sketches I mixed areas of colour with monochromatic areas with tonal shading, which helps to elevate the blue house into a strong focal point within the scene.

I’m finding it difficult to set time aside to sketch when we’re on the move, but because we’re based in Finiki for a week it was a lot easier to get into a more gently daily flow where there was more time to sketch and paint.