The journey I chose to take went from the front of a gothic cathedral to the interior of a tea shop/ café. I brought my pencil case and watercolor set, hoping to use most of what I had, but sadly didn’t on this occasion. I limited myself to a thin-tipped black pen and, once or twice, watercolors. I also had to take the journey on two separate days, since the cold became too uncomfortable on the first day to sketch until I could reach the required number of 20 or so drawings. The weather made the experience no less enjoyable, though. I even enjoyed seeing the (very tiny) raindrop marks add texture to my first few sketches. The fresh ink would bleed every time a raindrop made contact with where I was drawing. Not enough to be irritating, but just enough to add some interest.

Clocktower of St. Michael’s Church, as seen from the back. I noted on this first drawing that the exercise from the previous section with drawing while looking at the page minimally helped greatly.

An elongated window and evergreens from the back of St. Michael’s Church.

After drawing elements of the church, I turned to less spectacular, but still interesting elements of my route such as: a motorcycle parked in a dark passage, a iron balcony so complex, it looks like a tangled mess, or a tree branch weighed down with Christmas lights.

I tried challenging myself with a bit of work with perspective as well. I tried to make the street views look at least halfway believable, which I more or less managed. But after analyzing other artist’s work, the drawings lack personality. True both for the landscape and for the people in the landscape. This is something to work on in the future. Not necessarily a style, but capturing a mood or emotion in what I’m quick sketching. I feel I’m still rather stuck on trying to make things look real instead of believable.

Alleyway draped with lightbulbs overhead.

Attempt at a quick sketch of a street and sunset.

Ice skaters under the Matthias Corvinus Monument.

Benches, streetlights and trees.

Brightly colored buildings behind little white street vendor stalls.

An elaborate door, drawn from a photograph while inside the café.

Drawing from the photograph was a bit more familiar than drawing from life in the middle of the street, and sitting down in a warm place helped me take things slower and be more detailed. But that is an approach I can still take when drawing outside, I just have to work on my patience, or to use materials that cover more surface area, so I can then focus on specific details.

Neither photography nor editing photographs are my strong suits, but I did my best to look at the route from a new angle with the camera lens.

What is the relationship between the photos and the drawings you made in your sketchbook?

I mostly focused on silhouettes, colors and textures and lighting I had not captured in my short sketches.

Do you see the photographs as a form of reference to possibly help you inform your earlier sketches or do you consider them to be an alternative and separate form of visual language?

I like using photographs as reference for my drawings, and I don’t consider myself a good enough photographer to make them stand on their own as individual pieces.

Did the process of taking the photos make you want to return to any of your sketches and develop them in some way?

I did not necessarily take them in mind with elaborating on previous drawings, so I did not feel the need to later.

I have used photographs of streets and landscapes I have previously taken on vacations as reference for previous pieces, and I have taken photographs for specific projects before, but I have not used them just for the sake of sketchbook study. That is something to add to my sketchbook repertoire from now on.

For my single figure drawing, I spent some time in the kitchen, drawing my mother while she was preparing lunch. I drew her figure from the back as she was cooking and a close up of her profile. She kept moving around, of course, but the fact that most of the actions were repetitive and that all had to be done standing relatively in the same position meant that I could jump from one drawing to the next when she moved.

I also drew some quicker sketches of her face and arms, though the results are a bit disjointed. And later, she turned and drank her ginger tea, which meant I could draw a more detailed sketch of her hands.

For people drawings outside of the house, I had to be much quicker than in my pencil illustrations, so I used a pen with a wide tip and chalk pastels instead of graphite and colored pencil. In the drawings of my mother, I had the luxury of time and an eraser, but when drawing people in constant motion who are also moving along, I had to be more decisive and more simple with my shapes, especially if they were moving very fast like a cyclist or someone out jogging.

I first went to the market closest and then to a more modern store. At the market, I sketched people sitting behind tables and selling their produce (one of which was singing a silly tune about his wild berries in order to attract customers), I also sketched the shoppers in all shapes and sizes that they came. In the shop, I saw a boy pushing around a mini grocery cart at great speeds.

Sketching people in public is a very different experience than just drawing environments or buildings. Not least of all because I would rather not get caught staring and drawing people, so there is a certain amount of fortified nonchalance required for the task. A different challenge was the speed and good visual memory needed. People tend to move around then move on, so I could only record so much before I had to continue from memory. Overall, it was a fun challenge.

In mimicry of Dr. Emma Powell’s sketchbook from the first assignment, I printed out my images and stuck them in the sketchbook in order to record everything I was doing and to have them all in one place. I sectioned them into three different categories based on the words I chose as descriptors. The first section I called the Gothic one simply because of the gothic style of the cathedral in the photographs. The second I considered the Warm Lighting section, because of the multiple images I had that used a contrast between the cool environment with the warm lighting. The third I called Elegant/Unkept, because of the contrast of the beautiful architecture with run-down buildings. In the end, I ended up incorporating some of the elements from the third section into the first.

After I was satisfied with my images and planning, I started sketching out my first idea with the gothic church. In the colored photographs, I happened to like the contrast between the colorful sunset sky and the grey church and street, so I decided to enhance that by using only grey ink for the buildings and church, and use colorful watercolors for the sky.

Using both photographs and previous sketches from my route I also sketched out a more detailed version of the clocktower from the gothic building in order to have a better idea of what it looks like and what its forms are.

In my second sketch, I took one of the images from the third section, because I thought the Lightbulb alley environment fit the Warm Lighting theme very well, even though the lights weren’t actually on when I took the photograph. I used colored pencils to create the atmosphere I was looking for and invented some characters to give the drawing some more life.

Then I moved on from the sketchbook pages to larger pieces of paper to make more finished artworks. I started out with the Gothic image, first sketching out the general composition, then painting over it with ink and watercolor, creating a more detailed illustration than my initial sketch, but keeping the same spirit and letting the buildings sustain a run-down look I had remarked upon from the third section of images. Style-wise, I was inspired by the work of David Gentleman, who uses ink with a little color in his work.

On the next illustration, I first experimented with black paper and oil pastels. Drawing light on dark instead of dark on light. The results were… fine, and the drawing helped me refine the composition I was looking for, but ultimately I moved on to a piece of white watercolor paper with watercolors and  chalk pastels. Also a new combination for me, but one i have found appealing, though I don’t particularly like the tendency of chalk pastels to deteorate even when sprayed with fixative. Both illustrations were somewhat inspired form Evan Turk’s techniques, though not necessarily his style. The “frame” around the drawing is one element I have to attribute to him, and so are the overly bright colors I used, which I do not tend to favor otherwise.

I enjoyed using both my photographs and sketches to create more finished artworks. With this more thought out process I have managed to create more lively and interesting illustrations in contrast with similar ones I have created before using my own photographs, or using other people’s photographs.

Playing the “What if…?” game on my own illustrations was indeed, fun. I started out by combining several of my illustrations into a single one, again using the theme of Elegant/Run Down from the previous exercise, this time combining the run down window of the establishment in one image with the elegant door of the one of the official buildings close by.

Then I took two more images and combined those by moving the character from in front of the Cartofiserie to the front of the elaborate gate. This resulted in a less interesting image than before, but since I liked the character and I liked the previous image, I chose to overlap those in the next sketch.

This I was more happy with. So I took the image into photoshop and re-drafted it in order to refine the lines and the forms. Then I printed the image out several times and stuck the different photos in my sketchbook in order to experiment with colors. In one, I kept it simple and highlighted the important elements with red. In the next, I tried to mimic the warm color palette from my previous illustration, giving the image a cozy, comfortable atmosphere. In the last I changed the color scheme around for something cooler, which makes the image seem more uninviting and sad. The warm colored illustration looks like it belongs in a book about a happy story, with a main character who looks in on the café with a positive air, like he’s just about to go in, but the cool colored one looks like it belongs in a book about a character that feels isolated, like he cannot enter where the warmth is.

In my last illustration, I wanted to reverse the image, so I selected the image of the child pushing the empty shopping cart and created an image where the child is pulling a full shopping cart. First I sketched out a few ideas on how I would want the character to move and which motion would best suit the idea, then I created  a more refined sketch on the next page.

I like the freedom that this exercise creates about the subject of using reference images. It both determined me to use the references and to push them beyond what they are into something more descriptive or more interesting. Some of the techniques I was already using before, but this exercise would help even more when creating images for a certain brief. I would be able to use my reference, but also narrow it down and change it until expresses exactly what I need it to express.

Doodling is something I used to do a lot more before, but I must have stopped sometime because when I sat down to do it, I couldn’t remember the last time I doodled in a sketchbook. I tend to doodle when I am somewhere I am meant to simply listen but also happen to have something to take notes on, like at a conference. So for me doodling tends to happen on random scraps of paper or notebooks meant for writing. Sometimes it is something simple like geometrical shapes, small faces or other body parts like hands, eyes or ears. But most of the time I just fill in spaces with hatching and crosshatching. This hatching habit is one I have had for years, ever since my first art teacher told me to practice drawing lines and hatching as much as I could because I would only be able to create even lines after a lot of practice. He was right, of course. Though I still draw many wonky lines even after all this time.