Urban sketching

During my visit to London I bought a book from the shop in the RA. This little book caught my attention as the topic of drawing from real life has been on my mind lately. I have realised that I have fallen into the pitfall of only drawing for the projects I am working on rather than just drawing because something might interest me or to keep up my practise. This seems to have occurred with the types of projects that I have been doing over the last year or so. Learning how to write for children, projection mapping, the technical aspects of animation have lead me to slightly forget about these fundamental elements of art. Mainly the world we live in and the people, animals and plants the inhabit this world. They are the roots of all stories, all images, all art for that matter.

This has become more apparent to me as I have been looking into the works of many fantastic artists. One thing has struck a chord with me, how prolific many of the greatest artists actually are. How many proprietary drawings they create, how many seemingly unrelated sketches are drawn. These are the backbone of these artists successes, they lay the foundations for all of their art.

The book covers the topics of proportion, contour, gesture, expression, context, likeness and different mediums that can be used. The book is not groundbreaking new knowledge, instead it reinstates many things I have already been made aware of through my studies. However it does highlight that there are many things that I am not doing and if I want to be the best artist I can be then this has to change. This had already occurred to me prior to going to London but this little book just reaffirmed what I had been thinking and seems to have given me a jolt that was required. Sketching those in front of me became a huge part of my trip with a few of these shown below. The book did contain something very interesting at the very back, a set of challenges as shown above. I know that if I take on these challenges through the course of this project and then continue to keep up these challenges they will become a habit. One very good habit for any artist to have, the plan is to do these challenges but to continue building upon them. For instance drawing people on public transport does not mean that after drawing people on a bus I should simply tick it off as done. Instead I should think what other forms of public transport are there, sports events are the same as there is a variety of sports events I could attend. With each little sketch of each challenge my skills and knowledge as an artist will improve and eventually I will have built a catalogue of people and places they can then feed into the work that I produce.

The sketches of the people below were done after I had attended the E.H Shepard exhibition. Whilst drawing these people I noticed two main things, firstly I was paying far more attention to the person, the light and shadows, their features. Secondly I was also far more aware of the marks I was making, I was giving more consideration to which directions line should go, what could I leave out. The term economical use of line was going through my mind when sketching these people. I also realise that it would be very good practise for me to try other methods and use a variety of materials. One thought is to include backgrounds already covered in inks, colours, splashes, use coloured papers to create a mid tone that would allow me to only put marks down for the lightest and darkest areas. This idea probably comes from my knowledge that I need to work on tonal qualities. These sketches will also help build up my knowledge of composition as putting myself in many situations will lead to a better understanding of creating interesting compositions that can lead the eye through a drawing as I intend the viewer to see. Although the one major difference was that these people were rather still compared to others I had been doing previous to that point who were mostly walking past me at the time of drawing them.