People Study

It's pretty obvious that I'm still looking for a style that I can call mine. I may never reach that goal but I'm having fun getting there. Remember the old slogan "Getting there is half the fun"? To me it's ALL the fun and that's why this blog's title is "Watercolor Journey".

This morning I thought I'd try something a bit different.

I took out this crowd picture

 

 and chose the guy with the messenger bag to play with.

Click to enlarge.

First I drew him in pencil as a pure contour - no looking (pale drawing, bottom left). Those sketches are always ridiculous and I just love doing them.

Then as a contour but with the occasional look. (Pale drawing, bottom centre). The improvement is obvious.

Then I tried with ink, from left to right. It takes me a lot of courage to sketch directly in ink, so I'm quite pleased with these results.

The last sketch, the one with colour, is my favourite. And it proved what I've been suspecting - that smaller is better, and what I call "scratchier" is better too. By this I mean a certain amount of going back and forth over the line, and not just a single line like the big one on the left. This allows correcting as you go along, and by the way that's a real sketching style, and it's used by many professional artists. Shiho Nakaza is one of them.

Copyright Shiho Nakaza

P.S. The ink blotch is due to a defect of my favourite fountain pen, the Carbon Ink Pen. I can no longer trust it, and that makes me very sad.