‘People watching’ is a good way to understand human movement and interaction. So I went with my sketchbook on the road (train stations) and in the city (event).
As this exercise is about moving figures and as I struggled in the last exercise with the depiction of movement, I told myself to sketch more on the spot, embracing the movement as well as keeping key elements in my memory to make the sketch a bit more of a believable and recognizable setting.
Stefan513593 – Project 5 – Exercise 2 – a
Stefan513593 – Project 5 – Exercise 2 – b
Stefan513593 – Project 5 – Exercise 2 – c
How successful were your attempts to retain an image of a scene to draw later?
=> As I mostly made my sketches on the spot and continued from memory (mostly of one or two focus elements of figures) as the figures moved away, I didn’t work from captured images so much.
However, I would always do a few sketches of the place to absorb the ‘spirit’ of the place instead of just talking photographs.
Learnings:
- Sketching moving figures in group on the spot works better if either some figures are not moving or are rather still or the situation is such that there is a constant flow of people through the setting, e.g. escalator, event in the city.
Next time:
– Considering colour in a bit more subtle way. I notice that the applied colors are not really correct (like my old bad habit of using pure colors) As I had a small traveler watercolor set with me I did not worry about mixing colors. Overall I like to rather monochrome sketches with light washes (water-soluble pencil or ink pen) more.
– As during part 3 (outdoor) I worked more on larger scale outside I would like to work more in this direction. I have still to think about how.