A look at why I’m inspired to sketch the people I sketch, and how I approach choosing the starting point, and focal point of each sketch.

Be Inspired to Sketch

I know for me, when I look at a subject, if there’s nothing about it that grabs my attention, I’m not inspired to sketch. If I do actually force myself to sketch something I’m not inspired by, it NEVER turns out well. (Case in point, this portrait I attempted, twice, and neither are good, because the source image had nothing about it that inspired me).

What’s your why?

So when you look at a scene or subject, the first task for me is always to assess what is attracting me to this image. It’s the “why” are you sketching. I’m attracted to shapes, colours, and action. So when I’m sketching people, I could be inspired by:

• the shape of their hair,
• the colour or combination of colours in their clothes, skin tone or hair etc, and,
• the shape or posture of their body

I sat next to this family in a local cafe, and I loved the natural V-shape created by the posture of these two girls. Both leaning back, both on their phones, both with glasses, both with long hair. One wrapped up against the cold, the other enjoying the sun in her tee shirt.

This scene was an immediate pull for me, and I couldn’t grab my sketchbook quick enough, and I was really happy with the end sketch.

I accentuated how close they were to their phones to increase the storytelling aspect of – two girls sitting next to each other, but ignoring each other and rapt attention on their phones.

When sketching a person that’s a focal point, there’s usually one area of interest that draws me to start sketching their face. In the sketch above I started with the pony tail of the girl on the left.

The focal point to start with is not always the same element, so I don’t have a consistent way of starting a portrait or sketch of a person. Here’s some different ways I have started a sketch:

• Contour line around their hair or head shape
• Their eyes
• Their glasses, especially if they dominate the face

Some artists teach you to draw the shapes first, before getting lost on the detail. So this approach would be to do a contour or continuous line around the head, and then fill in the details. And other portrait artists, like Dyan Sara, appears to always start on the element that piques their interest the most, it could be a feature, a shape, or a tonal area.

One of the concepts Oliver Hoeller covers in his book “Pack Your Sketches Full Of Life“, is to ask yourself why you’re sketching what you’re about to sketch. He advises us to look at a scene or person, and assess what is it about the scene that is speaking to us.

Identify your Focal Point

I’m a big fan of starting with that biggest area of interest. It’s what your eye is drawn to and is the obvious focal point. Sometimes when I’m sketching people, I start in an area like the hair, because that’s what attracted me to the sketch in the first place, but as I continue sketching, I may decide to make another area (like the eyes, or the lips, or another feature of the portrait) the focal point, with colour or tonal value.

So although the initial why I’m sketching the scene often becomes the focal point, it doesn’t always. As I progress with a sketch, the focal point may change. But I think it’s important to identify the focal point before you get to the tonal shading or colouring stage of a sketch, because both of these techniques help to identify a specific area as the focal point.

Leave Out Confusing Sections

If you’re looking at a subject to sketch, and there’s something confusing about an object or the tonal values that you can’t quite make out or feel distracting, it’s better to just leave it out rather than guessing what to put in. Your eye will naturally fill in the gaps you leave out. But if if make an unrealistic mark, it was actually draw your eye to the “error”.

In the sketch of these two girls, I didn’t sketch the chairs they were sitting on. They weren’t essential to the story I was sketching, and would have just been a distraction, so I left them out. Instead I sketched more of the girls legs in the green trousers and overlapped the bodies so that there was a feeling of solidity about the sketch. I also liked that the negative space above the knee was mirrored to a lessor degree below the knee. Not planned, but a very happy accident.