I gave a workshop in Santo Domingo during the Urban Sketchers symposium, so I didn´t have much time for sketching myself. But I had the opportunity to participate in two other workshops, What´s Behind An Onion with Swasky and Miguel Herranz, and Capturing The Event with Thomas Thorspecken. Both were fantastic, I had so much fun during these sessions.
In the Onion workshop we worked a lot with layers, foreground and background, and how to emphasize one or the other by playing with line width, colour, drawing tools and ways of drawing. I tried out so many fun things here, and hearing two great sketchers talking about how they think and work things out when they draw was very enlightening.
In the Capturing the Event workshop, Thorspecken talked about how he has become a steady visitor at cultural events, where he goes drawing to capture what happens there. He also shared a few things about how he builds up his drawings, and then we headed out to try it out for ourselves.
One point that Thomas really made clear, was that he ALWAYS finishes his sketches, no matter what. I´m sorry, Thomas, I didn´t quite make it with this one. I wanted some more shading on the buildings and something to make the ground feel solid, but alas, it was time to go. This is one of the first sketches where I really struggled to get people at different distances from myself actually have their correct proportions. I really struggled to try to measure their heights, and draw some main features before they disappeared out of sight. Otherwise I am usually quite sloppy with that, I just draw, and if it ends up a bit crooked, it´s not too big of a deal. This was like laying a difficult puzzle, even though there aren´t that many people in the scene.
The great thing about the Symposium workshops is that no matter what level of drawing skills you have, you will always learn something new from the instructors. It is such a cool experience to try on someone else´s technique or ways of thinking when sketching, you always discover new ways of looking at the world around you!