People Watching along the Place d’Armes, Porquerolles

Sketching people is a form of people watching and what could be a better subject for a sketch that marks the completion of my first year of blogging? Today is the anniversary of my first Deliberate Sketching post from 2015 and during this year I became increasingly aware of how important observing and recording the details of a scene is to the meaning a sketch conveys. Sketching others in the process of observing somehow seemed a fitting topic for this landmark day. (I will have a post soon that summarizes my thinking about my progress in learning how to communicate visually.)

In this sketch I worked on body language and the feeling of summer. The body language of the two figures in the foreground shows a kind of idle interest in the people off to the right. The way one figure leans forward while the other tilts her head back around her friend shows their curiosity. Their calm posture suggests that they are not invested emotionally in what they are seeing, they are just resting a bit and watching others.

I also wanted to show the summer heat in this sketch, which I was definitely feeling. The sun is really bright here in Porquerolles France, so bright that even with sunglasses on  I saw blobs of red, white and black swimming around as I drew. I  used strong purples in the shadows and backlit the figures on the right to replicate the feeling of intense heat.

This is a pencil and watercolor sketch on multimedia paper.