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| Three small vignettes |
Gabi Campanario kicked off Seattle’s series of Urban Sketchers 10x10 workshops with “Pocket Urban Sketching” – an
introduction to using the small sketchbook format. Going back to his roots,
Gabi showed us some of the many small books he filled before he ever conceived
of Urban Sketchers. The portable format enabled him to sketch whenever he found
a moment to capture an image, and he encouraged us to do the same.
“A small, easy-to-carry notebook makes sketching less
intimidating and is ideal to create fast drawings on the go,” he said in his
class handout, and he spent this morning showing 14 sketchers how to put a
large picture onto a tiny page.
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| Three small vignettes |
Amazon campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood was
our workshop site. On this cold morning (I sure was glad I wore my down jacket
and fingerless gloves!), our first exercise was to create a spread of three
vignettes in varying sizes. Making a small-, a medium- and a large-sized image
on the same spread gives visual variety and interest to the composition. White
spaces can be filled with the date, journal writing and other notations.
Our second exercise was to make a single wide cityscape
across the page spread. (This is my personal sketching challenge and the reason
I took the workshop: I always feel like I need a large page to capture a large
scene, and yet I know it’s just a matter of scaling. I wanted to learn how to
fit it all in!) Standing on a street corner facing the Amazon spheres, Gabi demonstrated how he first decides the
scope of his composition, then chooses a building to be the relative measuring
gauge for everything else that will appear in the sketch.
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| 7" x 5 1/2" page spread |
As we started the exercise, my first inclination was to
walk across the street to get as far away as possible from the spheres so they
would become “smaller” in my eyes. But I wanted the challenge of the full, in-your-face view, so I stood close to the spot Gabi stood for the demo. I was
pleased by how much I got into the spread (at left)!
I think both exercises – the three small vignettes and
the wide cityscape across a spread – are ideal for travel sketching, because
I’d be able to capture more small images in shorter periods of time. We were
given 3 ½-by-5 ½-inch softcover sketchbooks (donated by Stillman & Birn) for the workshop, and I think I might use the
rest of mine to practice these concepts before the next time I travel.
It was a fun and informative morning learning from Gabi, and
it was also a privilege to take a workshop from the Seattle Sketcher!
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| Gabi demos how he fits a huge scene into a small sketchbook spread. |
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| Gabi discusses the three vignettes exercise. |
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| Chilly workshop participants listen attentively! |
I've worked in sketchbooks that small, but like you I usually sketch only one subject per page. I think it would be hard to get an entire scene on such a small page. You did a good job!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Joan! Nothing like a workshop to help me face my challenges! :-)
DeleteYou're already a champ small-book sketcher, Tina. I was doing some as an "extreme sketcher" but the temps got too low for even extreme sketching so I'm waiting for it to warm up a bit. I really believe in doing sketches in different sizes and carrying a small book everywhere.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Larry! My habit is to do lots of small, single-object images in my small-format sketchbooks, but I'm always befuddled by how to capture a wide scene or entire cityscape in a pocket notebook. The workshop really helped me get a better handle on that.
DeleteThis is great!! I'm going to have to make myself try this more often. Scaling down an interior or street scene (or a landscape, or anything that's a scene and not a single object) is always daunting because I'm not sure how much or how little to include. Where does the scene stop, and then how do I get the actual life sized scene into my little sketch book!?? And that's just scaling... forget about perspective and everything thing else!! I wish Gabi would put this class on Craftsy.
ReplyDeleteIt was so easy once he explained it --a "duh" moment! My next post will explain a bit more about what he taught us. Stay tuned!
Delete