A clear morning at a location I’d never sketched at…
A few things I did differently with this drawing, varying my typical urban sketch process:
- Focused extra time/attention on realistic object size and placement
- Colored before setting down any pen lines
I typically don’t go nearly so detailed on a pencil sketch (if I use a pencil sketch at all). The habit of skipping an underlying sketch has built up my confidence with lines with the effect of making my linework stronger, but my accuracy tends to suffer as a result.
This time I’m happier with the accuracy of my final result compared to the actual depth of the space I was in. There was plenty of erasing to resize objects; part of the fun of drawing is in seeing how your perception of size changes when you’re comparing items closely together in your view, versus just glancing at a scene in passing.
My second major process variation was to set down colors before lines, and I’m very glad I did this. With so many organic shapes (trees, shrubs), differentiating them with line first would have been a mess; I would have certainly added too many unnecessary lines. Establishing the variety of greens first before outlining them helped me to keep them orderly in my head. Plus, with colors down first, I was better able to judge which spaces needed more help from a heavier line to distinguish them. My linework itself seemed to improve as a result, because the line weights were more tailored to what was needed.
My colors are overly bright (because I was running out of time, and didn’t stop to mix/alter much), but the aspect of this sketch which I gave the most focus—object depth/size—turned out much better than what’s typical for me. So I’m quite happy with this sketch. 🙂
Plus, I managed to maintain focus on the page despite participating in a fairly lively conversation with the other sketchers in my group. This is a great skill for plein-air competitions, so I was delighted that it went well here!
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