Inktober 2022 - Day 29 - Sketching Workshop

 Today I attended an excellent sketching workshop called "Shapes, Colours and Stories" given by Ian Fennerly from the UK. It was sponsored by the NYC Urban Sketchers. I love Ian Fennerly's work and when I was at the Porto Symposium I attended one of his demos. Thru Etcher I also did an online class with him during the pandemic. 

The class was in Times Square...right in the heart of it. Luckily he found a location for us to work from that was a bit away from the insanity of all the dressed up figures, tour hustlers and entertainers. 

The general idea of the workshop was to focus on the story of the area with the signs and activity around the water using the street lamp posts to block in the sketch. Slowly we added the details. We worked on our ink sketches with assorted thicknesses of pens in several stages (the first was with a light grey Tombow marker which we used instead of a pencil to place the largest items in our sketch. We redrew the items with a 0.2 permanent marker adjusting them as needed.  Then we transitioned to watercolor. The final steps will be to do tone work with grey Tombow ink markers. Ian did a demo of each step on his sketch and then allowed us to do the same while he came around commenting and giving advice as needed. It was only a 3 hr class so a lot was crammed into a small amount of time. He suggested waiting to finishing the last step with the ink markers until he sent us his finished sketch to see what he added and where. A lot of the tonal shading is done directly over the watercolor and the sketching we already did. 

Here is my unfinished sketch which I am using as my Inktober sketch for today. I will work on this more and promise to post it when I am done.

 

Here is a photo of Ian explaining what he added to his sketch.

Portraits Galore

At the beginning of next month the NYC Urban Sketchers will be having our annual Portrait Party. Here's a link to last year's event. We divide up the members into groups and each person in your group takes a turn posing...for 10 minutes only. You have to capture them in 10 minutes on a 8 x 10 piece of watercolor paper in a medium that will stand out from far away so when they are displayed on the floor in a grid everyone can see them. I started practicing last night and did a few practice sketches of Gerri our model this morning at portraits. Then I did a longer pose of her.

These were done last night using a Tombow marker and my watercolors. I think that is what I will use because the Tombow bleeds in a bit with the watercolors. I did a very quick sketch in pencil first to sort of place the features. Except for the one of me, these were all done from photos...mostly mine, but MLK was done from one on the internet.

MLK

Me

My nephew, Joe

My friend, Jeanne

I forgot to bring the Tombow with me to portraits this morning so I used a black brush pen, but it didn't work as well as the brown Tombow. I wish the person who organizes the models didn't let them read while they are sitting. I hate sketching people with their eyes closed. I'll have to suggest that we have a certain amount of time to sketch them looking up before they start reading. 

Here is Gerri's longer pose.