Past Prime

4/14/14 Platinum Carbon ink, Kuretake brush pen, Pitt Artists Brush pen, watercolor,
Canson XL 140 lb. paper

A little past its prime, this beautifully asymmetrical cherry tree near Green Lake was nonetheless giving its all. The fat, round clusters of pink blossoms were still as exuberant as I was, dressed in T-shirt and sandals as I sketched.

Value Sketch at the Park

4/13/14 Koh-I-Noor Tri-Tone colored pencils, Canson XL 140 lb. paper

We seem to be skipping over spring and going straight to summer! The temperature was up to the mid-60s this afternoon, and wherever I looked at Maple Leaf Park, people were dressed in shorts and flip-flops. (Although I wasn’t quite ready for shorts, I regretted the socks I was wearing.)

As I settled down on a bench and pulled out my usual pen and watercolors, something about the playground scene reminded me that I still hadn’t done a sketch for this week’s Urban Sketchers Flickr group theme, Value Drawing – “Don’t draw lines, only tones.” And then I remembered that I had done a monochrome ink sketch of the same scene about a year ago. The busy-ness of the playground and the two trees and their shadows must lend themselves to tonal sketching.

When I’m using watercolors, I feel compelled to create hues that match reality as much as possible. I know I don’t have to, but I can’t seem to help myself. When I’m focusing on value, though, I feel liberated to use any color. And so it was today when I pulled out the only two pencils in my bag: Koh-I-Noor Tri-Tone colored pencils, one with shades of green and a second with an odd mix of reds and pale blue. The fact that they were both somewhat unsharp also saved me from the temptation to draw in details. I don’t use graphite pencils much, but these multi-hued pencils are a fun kick in the pants!

Up Close and Personal

4/12/14 Platinum Carbon ink, watercolor, Zig marker, Pitt Artists Brush Pen, Canson XL 140 lb. paper

When the “no parking” signboards started going up on our block a week or two ago, we knew something was up. Sure enough, a couple days ago the heavy equipment, noise and dust arrived. The next day the letter from Seattle Public Utilities finally came: A sewer line repair would be taking place during the next four weeks.

I waited until today, Saturday, when I knew they wouldn’t be working so I could get up close and personal with the bright yellow digger. Cars, planes, boats, construction machinery – sketching vehicles of any kind intimidates me. But I have been looking at and thinking about all the delightful vintage cars in Lapin’s book and how he makes them come alive. I have also been thinking about Inma Serrano’s Urban Sketching workshop in Barcelona last year, during which she urged us to sketch buildings as living, breathing monsters instead of inanimate architecture.

It doesn’t take much imagination to view a crawler excavator as a monster, so I pulled up my little stool a few feet away from the big guy and channeled my inner Lapin and inner Inma.

Danny Woo Gardens and Panama Hotel

4/11/14 Platinum Carbon ink, watercolor, Canson XL
140 lb. paper

The Friday ad hoc sketchers were meeting at the historic Panama Hotel and teahouse, but I think everyone had it in the back of their minds to sketch outdoors if we lucked out on weather. Indeed, despite a bit of a chill, the sun was out, so most of us opted to walk across the street to sketch at the Danny Woo International District Community Gardens.

Rich with trees, vegetable and flower gardens and even a chicken coop, the multi-tiered space is a tangle of crooked stairways and surprising peek-a-boo views of many downtown landmarks. After a quick sketch of a couple of garden residents clucking and scratching in their coop, I settled in to sketch a tree that had been cut down with Safeco Field behind it. Like several other sketchers, I decided this community garden is worth several return visits, especially as the weather improves.

I explored the gardens a bit more, then went back to the Panama Hotel to warm up with a cup of genmaicha and a matcha green tea shortbread cookie. Now used as a bed and breakfast and teahouse, the Panama Hotel (which figured prominently in the popular novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford) is full of comfy furniture and fun décor to sketch.

4/11/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown ink, Sailor pen, Zig marker

4/11/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown and Grey inks, Zig markers

Wash First, Then Line

4/10/14 Pilot Iroshizuku Ku-Jaku and
Diamine Chocolate Brown inks, Canson
mixed media paper (20-min. pose)

It had been more than a month since I went to life drawing practice, and I was feeling rusty. I got back into the groove quickly by using the technique I mentioned in my blog post last time: putting in large blocks of shading with a wash of ink first, then defining contours with a pen or pencil.

Last time I also mentioned a major advantage of using a waterbrush instead of bottles of ink for this type of application: no spills. A woman in the life drawing studio this morning was using bottled India ink and a large brush, and at some point during a 20-minute pose, the bottle overturned. Black and permanent as anything on earth, India ink spilled all over her drawing pad, clothes and the floor. During the break when she was still cleaning up, I showed her my waterbrush (which she was not familiar with) and mentioned its advantages. She took note, and I had a feeling she was going to run right out to get one ASAP.

4/10/14 diluted India ink, Pilot Iroshizuku
Take-Sumi ink (5-min. pose)

During another break, I stole a quick sketch of the model checking his messages. If a life drawing model is wearing a robe and doesn’t know I’m sketching him, it counts as urban sketching, right?

4/10/14 Pilot Iroshizuku Take-Sumi ink, Sailor pen (unposed)

Learning to Walk Again

4/9/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown and Pilot Iroshizuku Take-Sumi inks, Canson XL 140 lb. paper

As I mentioned in my review of Thomas Thorspecken’s book, Urban Sketching: The Complete Guide to Techniques, I think the small diagram showing the five-part breakdown of what a walking step looks like is worth the price of the book! Two years ago when I had been sketching only for a few months, I tried to do this kind of visual breakdown myself at Green Lake, just by observing, but it would have been so much easier had I had Thorspecken’s diagram. I studied it carefully, and then I again headed for Green Lake, where I knew this mostly sunny day would call more than a few walkers to its path.

Thorspecken says, “You need to pay attention to how people hold themselves – a person’s slumped shoulders or proud stance will say more about them than their facial features.” It’s true – even when they’re doing nothing but the simple act of walking, everyone has a unique gait, posture and rhythm. For about a half-hour, I watched all the strollers, runners, dog walkers, bike riders and skateboarders go by and made tiny stick-figure sketches of as many as I could.

4/9/14 Private Reserve Black Velvet ink, Canson XL 140 lb. paper

Book Review: Urban Sketching: The Complete Guide to Techniques

I think I can safely say that I’ve read every book in print with the words “urban sketching” in the title or that I know have an urban sketching focus. Although all of them have much to offer on various aspects of drawing on location, some have left me wanting. My personal urban sketching interest leans toward people rather than buildings or urban landscapes. Some books that focus on architecture relegate humans to the general “entourage” (an architectural term for trees, plants and other stuff surrounding a building) of the sketch. Even as I appreciate the information on architectural sketching (goodness knows I need the help), I’m often left wondering, “Is that all people are? Part of the ‘entourage’?

By contrast, as a regular reader of the blog Analog Artist Digital World, I am dazzled daily by the vibrantly peopled, fully saturated watercolor sketches of Thomas Thorspecken. Compared to most other well-known urban sketchers, Thorspecken’s sketches are unique in that they focus invariably on people and their activities rather than architecture. And the people who populate his sketches are usually not passively sipping coffee or gazing at laptops (as they often are in my sketches!); they are more often busily dancing, acting or otherwise moving, performing and doing in their community. More than any other urban sketcher whose work I’m familiar with, Thorspecken is interested in documenting the actions of people.

Knowing his sketching style, when I read his new book, Urban Sketching: The Complete Guide to Techniques, I was not surprised to hear him emphatically state numerous times that people are – and should be – the center of any urban sketch. “I firmly believe that adding convincing figures to any scene is the most important aspect of any urban sketch,” Thorspecken says. “Remember that no city scene is complete without the human element, so keep an eye open whenever you are sketching buildings to catch people on the street, too.”

With the human focus clearly established early in the book, he spends a significant portion of it showing the reader how to capture the gestures and poses of people we see in urban life. Although nude people are rarely seen in the urban landscape, he strongly advocates attending life drawing sessions to practice sketching the human form quickly. (I’m happy that the time I spend in Gage life-drawing sessions is validated; I find life drawing extremely useful in urban sketching, but I didn’t think many urban sketchers agreed with me.) In fact, he encourages sketching not only the nude model but the other life-drawing participants as well, since capturing the entire life drawing session is good practice for composing multiple people in a composition.

“Although an understanding of some anatomy is important, your job is to catch each person’s individual character with as few lines as possible,” Thorspecken says. “You need to pay attention to how people hold themselves – a person’s slumped shoulders or proud stance will say more about them than their facial features.”

This diagram is worth the price of the book!

The specific techniques he describes for effectively capturing human gestures, stances and movement are invaluable – and rarely discussed in urban sketching books. Thorspecken’s background as a Disney Feature Animation animator becomes clear in this section. In particular, he shows a five-part breakdown of what legs look like when walking, which is probably the single-most-often observed human movement in the urban environment. (I’m going to study that diagram very carefully and use it well! As far as I’m concerned, it’s worth the price of the book.)

The second-strongest point I gathered from the book is related to storytelling. “Your goal shouldn’t be to just draw things, but to convey and imply the underlying story,” he says. By posting daily sketches and blogging about the details surrounding his subjects, Thorspecken himself is not merely documenting a scene; he is acting as a reporter. “When you begin sketching events every day in your city or town, you will become a journalist, reporting on the activity of your community. . . . Your art can inform, enlighten and help bring people together.” Indeed, blogs, Facebook and other social media can be treated as news media available to anyone who wishes to broadcast their sketch stories.

Another major portion of the book is devoted to composition. Instead of simply drawing whatever is in front of us, we are encouraged to shape the composition to tell the strongest story. Thorspecken does not hesitate to move or remove objects, details or people from a composition if they don’t contribute to the story he sees and wants to tell with his sketch.

Throughout the book, Thorspecken includes numerous inspiring examples of his own work and that of many well-known urban sketchers to illustrate the principles he describes.

If you need lessons on drawing convincing architectural perspective, I recommend looking elsewhere. Covering the topics of one-point, two-point, three-point and three-point curved perspective (accompanied by thumbnails of converging lines that are so tiny they are useless) – all in 10 short pages – left me dizzy (although the examples he shows of these types of perspective are fascinating to examine).

Likewise, if putting people into your sketches is not a primary interest, your needs will not be served by this book (Thorspecken’s position on the importance of humans in sketches cannot be ignored or avoided).  Fortunately for me, my perspective of the role of people in the urban landscape is generally the same as his, so my conclusion in reading this book is, “Finally – an urban sketching book for me!”

(This review also appears on Amazon.com.)