Urban Sketches at the Clinic

Day Ninety-Three of Sketching People

Day 93 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. The clinic is a great place to sketch when the Drs and clinicians are running late.

Urban Sketching at the Clinic

When I was getting ready to go there, the first thing I thought about was … which sketchbook and pen shall I take. I ended up packing one Twisbi fountain pen, a light and medium grey, and a medium beige Tombow brush pen. I also took a pencil but didn’t use it.

Urban Sketch Lines

I prefer using black ink, but I love using my Twisbi with the EF nib – which currently has grey ink in it. So today’s sketches I feel are looking a little washed out because of the grey lines and the tonal shading.

There’s something about a black line that really visually appeals to me. But I’ve been in a quandary about using black ink lines in my sketches, because I’ve been focused recently on trying to vary line weights to achieve a greater sense of depth. That’s difficult to achieve if every line in a sketch is jet black. So I want to do more sketches with grey ink, and then restate some of the important lines with black ink.

Urban Sketch Tonal Shading and Watercolour

At the clinic I used my trio of Tombow brush pens to add some tonal shading. I don’t usually take anything but grey pens for shading, but I also took a beige one today to use for skin tones, which I really liked using. But of course, now I feel I need to add some more beige coloured Tombows to my usual urban sketching kit.

I did plan to leave all of these people sketches as ink with tonal shading, but I couldn’t resist adding some washes of watercolour to some of the sketches back at my studio.

By the time I added the watercolour on top of the tonal shading, the usual water soluable layer had dried and set well. It stayed in place even when I added the watercolour on top of it.

This was a valuable lesson. Usually I add the shading last because I don’t want it to bleed into the paint, but it just goes to show if I’m patient and don’t add the colour straight away, I can be successful in preserving the tonal layers.

I find that when the tonal shading and watercolour mingle it desaturates the colours and it can make them look dull and lifeless. This is a useful technique when you want to knock back some of the areas in your sketches, but it’s only a good technique when it happens when you plan for the desaturated areas. It’s not useful when it happens in areas you don’t want it to.

I sketched this guy from the back today with ink lines. I added watercolour and then added some tonal shading on top to add shading and desaturate the areas in shadow.

I was watching an Ian Fennelly tutorial the other day, and he’s a devout user of Tombow brush pens. One of the key stages in his sketches is to add the tonal shading last, not just to add depth to his sketch, but also to desaturate colours to tone down specific areas of the sketch.

The more tutorials I watch, the more I realise the importance of tonal shading. Colour doesn’t matter, it’s the tonal shading that add the life to the sketch.