Travelling Activity

While I was apparently catching that horrible flu virus early last week during the travelling I was doing, I was killing time with a few sketching games I tend to do while travelling. I was grabbing faces. A moderately careful face grab is to look through whatever magazines I have to hand (such as the in-flight magazine) and see if there are interesting faces… then I might do a quick or longer drawing of one or two that I find. Sometimes they are familiar people, as is perhaps the case with the one I show to the left. This was not intended to be super-careful, and was rather quickly done, but it turned out to be nicer than I expected.

I was simply drawing with a pen and not trying to be very accurate, and just capture expression and structure of the face, but my eye was in and so… (I’d have used pencil if I was planning to go for accuracy…) I liked it enough to finish it up when I got home and throw some watercolour (pencils and then water brush) on to it. (I took a quick snap of the magazine photo before I left to allow me to recall some features for finishing.)

I’ll spare you the other ones I did in that mode. Not for public consumption!

I also did another game, which is very useful – sitting in a large open space with lots of people passing and simply looking up, seeing a face, studying it for a few seconds, and then looking down and doing a quick sketch of it. The person is long gone by time I look up again, and so this is more about trying to grab and make sense of what I can, and maybe get some quick essence of the person. I was not so good at that this time… It has been a long time since I did such a thing. I should do it more…

Should be interesting to see who I find to draw in a magazine on the plane tomorrow…

-cvj