Urban Sketchers

Last weekend I went for the first time to an Urban Sketchers meeting. I had never drawn outside in public before, feeling too shy to do it but the idea to be in a group helped me to overcome this feeling.

Also I love to draw people and animals, I've never spent that much time on buildings so this meeting held a lot of challenging new experiences!

The first two drawings were done with a lead pencil, as I always do before inking and painting. But I realised that how I draw at home with plenty of time does not necessarily works outside for 40 minutes sketches. After the first session I just had the time to finish roughly my first sketch so I was amazed to see most of the people with finished paintings! I had a lot to learn!

As it started raining, we went to the Barbican center with a whole hour to draw. I thought I would start with a rough sketch and then try to ink and add watercolours but I got lost in the big scenery. All those lines, curves and perspective... I tried to remember the few rules I knew about perspective but realised I knew very little. Where is this line supposed to go, up? down? Should these lines join at some point? I squinted, tried to focus, to understand what I was seeing but my drawing was not working. After an hour I had nothing to show.

There was a Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition at the Barbican and few busts with the famous (well maybe only for French people?) blue stripes were on display. I had 5 minutes left so I switched to a black pen and quickly drew the dummy. I finally understood that the way I draw at home is not suitable for sketching outside, I have to be bold and use fountain pens directly.












We then moved to our next destination, Moorgate. Not wanting to reproduce what I had done with the Barbican I decided to find a smaller subject to draw than a whole scenery. Drawing directly with a fountain pen was scary but at the end of the session I had finally one drawing that looked finished.. well if I had the time to draw the base of the building that is! I realised how slow I was when most of my fellow sketchers had the time to draw and paint one, two or even three sketches in the same amount of time that it took me to draw this:

 

We then met at a café to compare our drawings. It is so much fun to see how different are the results when we were drawing on the same locations! 

It was a really nice experience with friendly and talented people, I will definitely go back!

Sandman

I'm re-reading Sandman comics again (I'm a huge Neil Gaiman fan) and could not resist from drawing Morpheus:

I did it on a whim, so it's not a great quality paper and you can see it had a hard time with my black markers. Anyway I quite like the result and I hope you will too.

Here is another picture of it with an instagram filter:

A new portrait

Still from a picture. It's funny how inspired I am to draw people when in real life I'm feeling quite awkward around them! Maybe I think that by drawing them I will understand fellow human beings a bit better? :)

Illustration Friday - Vanity

Illustration Friday's theme this week is vanity, in French "vanité" which can mean the same as in English but can also mean "vanitas".. and this reminded me of this one I draw:

I got this mini frame a couple of months ago, I wanted to put an identity photo in it but having none I decided to draw something in the meantime... and hum, the frame is still waiting for a proper photo..

Cornwall

A few weeks ago we went to Cornwall and since a part of me is still there; in a shepherd hut guarded by the friendliest pig, on coasts boarding turquoise waters that I didn't think existed in England, on paths making me feel like a hobbit in middle earth.

I wanted to share some magic here..

Magnolia

Illustration Friday's theme is natural, I thought the magnolia I painted a few weeks ago would fit.

This painting was inspired by a walk in London, all the magnolia trees decided to bloom at the same time, it was so beautiful! I first painted them in my journal but the paper is not meant for watercolours so I decided to redo it on proper watercolour paper.

Here is the first version:

More portraits

I keep working on drawing faces and using watercolours. Here is the latest portrait I worked on, my favourite so far: