Thursday, January 29, 2015

Urban sketchers meeting

The meeting took place at the Westmount conservatory - the only Victorian greenhouse in Montreal. A great place to sketch when it is -27C outside!

First plants:


 then people:

As usual they move! I wanted to sketch the woman and her friend seated around a small bistro table. They moved, so I decided to sketch the gentleman instead. I did not pay attention to the placement of the legs!

Somebody flipping through my sketchbook commented about this - she said she liked the legs this way, it gave a sense of unpredictability to the sketch. She found that sometimes sketches on the web lack the element of surprise - they are well done and all, but maybe too much so. Anyway, this is how I remember it...but it got me thinking about my sketches. What bothers me is that my sketches are not "pretty" - I  cannot turn them into a postcard or decide to hang them on  the wall. The pages are smudged, the composition is hurried (that is to say that I don't think about the composition until the end ...) ... and I keep waiting for the day when my skills will improve dramatically and my pages will be these little masterpieces...but I think there will always be an element of "all over the place" to my pages .... something unpredictable.

Here I sketched the gentleman and then I wanted to add the poinsettias behind. But poinsettias are not ...I wanted to add some flower shapes in ink, but I kept seeing animals, specifically fish (for example, above the left shoulder of the man). I added only the lines for the bench and the heater. I sort of like the floating feeling, but I might add floor lines to ground it a bit.