Flexing Those Urban Sketching Muscles

Yes, I should have been standing at my easel finishing off my winter painting before it turns  Spring but a dry day with a bit of sunlight had me reaching for my new rucksack and trainers! Chucked in a wee sketchbook, grey pigment liner, a pencil and off I went, sketchercise …. Time to flex those rusty Urban sketching muscles! 

After a 5km trot, found a nice bench and settled down to sketch, with a chilly wind and a temperature of about 5C it wasn’t too warm but I was well wrapped up. 

My sketching set up is usually in a wee square bag with a carrying handle (here it is on the left), I think it was a toiletries bag but I liked the rectangular shape and the net pockets for my bits and bobs. For on my bike or walking around the streets of Rome it was practical but now that I'm doing a lot of hiking a carrying bag makes you feel a bit lop sided, so I've bought a small light backpack and we'll see how that goes for the hikes.

The first Urban Sketch of the season is always nerve racking, can I still produce the goods! Trying to stop myself from rushing in and thwacking a lot of wonky crap down is a priority! Deep breaths and looking carefully first is the warm up, then first pencil lines and ….. let rip.

Because it was nippy there weren’t too many passers by in Margotshöchheim, so concentration was easy, apart from screaming kids at a local playpark and a small carnival's parade the time passed quickly. Soon I was about an hour and a quarter into my sketch when two lovely ladies stopped to admire my work and chat (ego boosting to say the least, especially as they didn’t tell me that their Aunt May/ Olive/ Jane/ Elsie/ Alice could draw wonderfully) after a break a last couple of strokes and I realised my sketch was finished and I was chittering, time to head for the 5km home journey.

As a starter, things went well, it’s amazing how quickly you start to ''rust'' if you sketch from reference photos, working on site is a whole different ball game with lots of distractions and issues. A photo is already flat, the frame of the photo acts like a viewfinder and the perspective is easy to check while you clearly can see where your viewpoint is. Am I looking down, am I looking up, where is eye level (the horizon), where is the frame of my sketch? All of these questions pop into your head and have to be answered before you really let loose, otherwise you start out and end up having a house without a roof or without the bottom floor. Another thing to consider is your medium! I love doing these Franconian half-timbered houses in watercolour because there are so many variations but with temperatures around the 5C watercolour dries very slowly (if at all) and the prospect of walking home with my sketchbook open in my hand just wasn’t  an option. I suppose that Copic markers would be helpful but unfortunately they remind me of '''colouring in sessions with my mum''. 

It was lovely that mum spent time with me but I didn’t want to fill in pictures that other people had drawn and worse still I hated felt tip pens and my mum’s insistence that all lines went in one direction and that you placed them carefully beside one another so that the ink didn’t overlap. We did draw together too but I couldn’t share her delight in colouring in and as the adult colouring in books became trendy a couple of years ago, I lived in horror of being gifted one. Ungrateful? Perhaps but I'd rather just have a piece of paper and a pencil then I'm happy as Larry (whoever he was …. wonder whether Larry's Aunt Elsie was a wonderful artist?)