Today I took several of the sketches I did yesterday at the Telluride Talk and used them to rework the sketch I posted yesterday. My primary goal was to use scale to convey greater physical distance between the speaker and the audience. And I wanted to include some of the other audience members I sketched the evening before. While it looks to me like the speaker is no longer standing in the midst of the audience, I feel I lost clarity by overdoing the inclusion of darks in the background.
Telluride has a tradition of public talks which I love attending because of the provocative topics and the many captive people I can draw. Most speakers have to work hard to explain the topic in terms that the general public can understand and I think I caught a bit of this effort tonight in this sketch. The speaker certainly had the attention of his audience and I think it is conveyed through their upright body posture. The speaker’s face and hands were expressive and capturing them helped me tell the story of his effort to teach us about his work. After the talk I used watercolor pencils to add color as this particular notebook does not take wet media. I did get a range of value in the color but it did not help me show the five feet or so of distance between the speaker, screen and audience. I need to take one of the heads in the audience and scale the other listeners, the screen, the door, and the speaker to it if I want to capture the distance between all the objects in the drawing. I may redo this sketch tomorrow with this goal in mind.
My plan for this day is to do several sketches in the style of last week’s ‘Pensive Figure’.
I went out sketching and caught several groups of people interacting. Here is a sketch I did of three people sitting at an outdoor restaurant.
This group was interesting to me as there was one animated woman, a second listening woman and a man who seemed to be disapproving or disengaged. The listening woman had her body turned to the man but her head was turned to the animated woman. The man sat silently, clasping his cup and looking away from the animated woman. It made me wonder what was going on. I was glad the animated woman had her foot up on the bench and her hands gesturing, it was fun trying to capture this unusual position. The outdoor dining patio gave the opportunity to use one point perspective and the archway had a very dark side that offset the light patio floor. Sadly, I easily slipped into my habit of building the sketch around the focus that caught my eye, in this case the animated woman’s foot. The sketch would have been more effective if I had placed the two women across the mid section of the page and put the man on the side. More detail indicating a restaurant would help, perhaps other diners or the dishes on the table. The paper in this Moleskine notebook does not take watercolor. I would have been more successful using paper better suited to the media I was using.
I really enjoy the fun of being in the flow of sketching and just drawing without doing the work of planning and following the plan. However, sketching for the fun of it is not the plan for this blog. Today was to be my last day deliberately practicing perspective but all I did was a quick, spontaneous sketch, without planning, vanishing points or converging lines. Even so, I believe the influence of this week’s work is evident in the pile of books and papers on the coffee table and the curves of the couch. And next week brings me more opportunity to get back on track and deliberately practice the craft of sketching.
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This is the end of my second week blogging about using deliberate practice to improve my skill at communicating my thinking through images. I learned much in this past week- how to plan a sketch using one and two point perspective and how to use an element in the sketch as a scale for the placement of the other elements. I am still working to develop fluency with perspective so that when I am in the flow of sketching I do not forget to do the analytical work of following my plan. My favorite sketch of the week is the ‘Pensive Figure’ because it has a range of line, color, tone, and expression.
In my third week I will build on my work from the previous week with body language and perspective and add a third focus of using variation in lights and darks to add interest to my sketches. I plan to aim for seven sketches similar in style to the “Pensive Figure.’
Putting perspective to work as a tool for telling a story will continue to be my focus today.
It is a rainy morning and we gathered in my brother’s cabin, glad to be in a warm space together. I was able to carefully plan and draw this sketch, taking time to get the proportions and the lighting right. I drew in pencil and am still undecided about inking over the sketch. Parts may benefit from the clarity of lines but I am pleased that I caught as much of the form as I did without the support of inked lines. The forest through the window looks more like a backyard with a fence, but I am pleased I was able to use the head of the figure as a scale for placing the different trees into the scene in a way that corresponds to the actual view through the cabin window.
I have been camping out of internet range and was unable to post. This is the blog I wrote for July 10, 2015
Continuing with my study of perspective, today I will sketch figures in the context of a full setting.
This sketch was planned with a single vanishing point. I adjusted the actual positions of the trees a bit to make the vanishing point clearer. I used the figure as a reference for the placement of the trees along the vertical and horizontal planes. I went back in and made the darks darker to emphasize the change in distance. Although I normally draw in ink, I used pencil so I could make adjustments. I used the shadow of the trees to show the rise of the hill, which added clarity beyond what I got from using the rise of trunks on the vertical plane. I do see a few color blobs that could be better used to convey location, but these slipped by me when I was sketching. The colors of the forest and the body language of the figure both add something to the story the sketch conveys.
A summary of my learning is that in addition to getting the placement of objects correct on a page, the tone of colors also matters.
I have been camping out of internet range and was unable to post. This is the blog I wrote for July 9, 2015
Remembering that my primary goal is to tell a story through image, my plan for today is to incorporate what I learned about perspective and proportion and construct a more convincing and less naive setting for my sketch.
So, here we are, a figure, a table, a camper and two trees, all gathered on a page.
I planned out a horizon, a vanishing point and proportions, and then when I actually began drawing got a little off. I somehow have a different scale for width than for length, so the table and camper appear less long than than they should. I like the way the camper turned out, the irregularities give it a living, smiling look. I did use the figure as a scale for height and placed the trees and camper up on the page in proportion to the figure. I got off from a consistent vanishing point which is most evident in the camper’s awning. I had to use the diameter of the trees behind the camper to convey how they recede in space because the camper obscures the tree trunks rising and the top edge of the paper ends below the tree line.
The summary of my learning for today is using all I plan to use is easily forgotten when I am in the flow of sketching. Planning is a different experience than sketching and learning to shift between the two will be important for me.
Deliberate Sketching 