As many of you know, I have written before about my fascination with drawing and my rather large collection of ‘how to draw’ books. It wasn’t a book that set me off down the current rabbit hole and even though it was only a few days ago, I don’t remember what did but here I am, firmly in the middle of all the information I can find on urban sketching.
This is a bit of a strange departure because I’ve been focusing on drawing things in my immediate environment, a small and relatively confined space, and I have often found that overwhelming. Why then would anyone in their right mind start looking at drawing/ sketching (I’m still not sure of the difference between those two terms) something as complex as a street scene? The first answer is that I really like some of the works I’m seeing in people’s sketch books and I’d like to be able to do that.
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| Odie in the dining room |
A bit of a side-track here but it is relevant. I was chatting the other day with one of my longest-standing friends who often says that she has no patience. Lately she has begun to refurbish old pieces of furniture and has found herself lost in the process and enjoying it. ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting,’ she mused, ‘if at my age I finally developed patience?’ We talked a bit more and as I thought outloud, I realized that a good determiner of whether I have patience with a certain activity or not involves whether I love it enough to put up with the necessary frustration that comes with learning how to do it or getting better at it if I already have some skill. If the activity itself, beyond the outcome, is sufficiently rewarding I’ll keep at it and go as slowly as I need to in order to get infinitesimally closer to my goal. The other part of that is if the goal is engaging enough it provides motivation for me to stay with the process.
Now, back to the current rabbit hole. As I looked at urban sketchbooks I was struck by the use of line and the way in which many of the sketchers used a limited number of colours of wash to create their sketches. When I started looking at the videos I found many people urging the newbie to simplify and giving permission for things not to be 100% visually accurate. What you want, they said, is the sense of the place and you can leave things out, add things in, or move things around to get the result you want. Seems to me that’s the way I used to explain the process of revising writing to students. That made me feel a little less anxious about making an attempt.
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| Gave up on the fountain pen |
Then I came across one person who said that he had come to sketching late at the age of 19. Well, if that’s late I’m hooped! His next remark hit home though. He said he had been afraid to start because he knew he wasn’t good at drawing and didn’t want to commit pencil to paper until he knew that he could do a good job. Then he realized that unless he put pencil to paper he wouldn’t have the chance to get good at it. That’s obvious but I often find that what I know in my head is quite different from my willingness to move out of my comfort zone to attempt something new.
Learning to draw isn’t new to me but it’s something I move away from and then get pulled back to. If written before about the F grade I got in a drawing course at university. Since then I’ve taken a couple of drawing courses and then let it go. Most recentlyI have filled one sketch book. The first of those drawings are from 2016. Then there’s a break and I started up again in 2020. There are only a handful of drawings in the second sketchbook for 2021 and 2022 but I have filled a sketchbook with neurographic drawings in that time. Now I’m pulled again in the direction of more representational work.
Some urban sketchers recommend working directly in ink with markers; some work first by blocking in the rough shapes with pencil; others swear by fountain pens for the initial line work. I went scurrying through boxes and came up with four fountain pens I had forgotten about that date back to my university days. I unearthed some prehistoric ink and found that chunks of it had solidified. I scooped out the chunks and loaded up the one fountain pen that has a mechanism to pull ink from a bottle.
That experiment was not a great success. Even though I cleaned the pen thoroughly, it alternated between not making any kind of a mark and dumping blobs of ink onto the paper. Ah yes, the joys of pen and ink. I made a drawing of part of my study and one of Odie’s cage against the window. Then I decided to work from a photo and actually put some water colour into the sketch. I started by blocking out shapes in pencil and then using a marker over them. Heeding the advice of the internet artists, I didn’t worry about correcting all of the lines that turned out to be in the wrong place.
It’s a start and thoughtful practice will help. I’m finding that sketching is a bit like building an instrument: you have to be aware of all of the parts and the whole at the same time. That’s a tall order and just as I think I’ve got one shape nailed I realize that the proportion or the vanishing point is off. I’m pleased that I didn’t give in to the temptation to endlessly chase my tail over it though.
Although I was hesitant to actually use watercolour paints in the sketch, I enjoyed mixing the colours. Some of them were surprisingly intense when they hit the paper. Oh well, make a mental note for next time. The resulting sketch is out of proportion and I clearly have very little control over the medium of water colours. I used to be better when I studied stage design in university so maybe I can dredge up some of that previous knowledge.
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| You have to start somewhere |
Anyway, at this point, it’s an intriguing pass time. I have no idea how long I’ll keep working at it or if I’ll abandon it completely at some point. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what level of patience this will require and whether or not I’m up to the challenge.
