Feature Photo: The Crab Market in Kep, Cambodia

After a good spurt of sketching from life, I suddenly became unmotivated for five days. It wasn’t until I started looking through my old travel photos from Cambodia and Vietnam that I was excited about picking up a pen to sketch people that I encountered during our travels.

I wish I’d been as enthusiastic about urban sketching people during that trip, as I am now. I could have filled multiple sketchbooks with all the vibrant scenes and people we crossed paths with. I took thousands of photos during our 3 months. Many deserve to be framed, and even more of them deserve to be sketched.

My urban sketches are looser—you have to sketch quickly because people keep moving, and sometimes you only get a fleeting visual of a pose before they leave the scene. But historically my sketching from photos have felt stiffer, and you lose some of that vibrancy and energy that sketching under pressure creates. But I was pleased to see that I managed to maintain some of those energetic lines I strive for.

I didn’t create them knowingly. It wasn’t until I reviewed the sketches after I’d applied watercolour that I realised I’d created some lively lines organically. This process of passing a critical eye over your sketches is a helpful way to get yourself to embrace the “bad” ones. In my creative world, there’s no bad sketch, because even one’s I’m not happy with, have something to teach me.

Saigon Street Scene

What I love:

• The motorcyclist on the far right. If you look at the actual lines, they’re not very accurate. But the way this continuous line sketch turned out gives this person a fleeting feeling of speed. Is it a man or woman? Who knows (and it doesn’t really matter), but it’s easy to see them as in a hurry. Plus with the background positioning of this person, it doesn’t need a lot of detail to convey the action.

What I Like:

• The layout of a chaotic cluster of angular buildings vs a chaotic cluster of rounder people.
• The balance of the white areas in the upper left to lower right.
• This composition creates a sense of place: Lots of buildings, lots of movement, lots of traffic.

What I can improve on:

• Add some shadows to ground the bikes and people.

Cambodia Beach Sketches

Guy on the left taking a photo:

• The power of this squatting pose is believable enough that you can overlook the fact that I’ve drawn him unrealistically skinny. I don’t think his lack of body mass detracts from the sketch at all. The emphasis on his skinniness actually adds to the sense of place.

Guy on the right in red sweatshirt:

• I love how loose the left sleeve is sketched. It’s a complex web of wiggly and broken lines to convey material folds. The line of action has been captured effectively with weight on the left arm and the way his head is turned to counter balance the pose.

Both of these figures have the looseness of quick urban sketches, rather than the stiffness of being drawn from a photo. This is a pivotal moment in my sketching journey. It shows I’m able to retain a consistent sketching style no matter whether I’m sketching from life or photos. Is this a fluke, or have I turned a corner?

Group Watching the Band

Groups of people close together has always been a favourite of mine. Sometimes my group sketches are simply a composite of all the individual people I see, that I combine together to form a group. For example. I’ve sat at cafes before and sketched individual people standing at the traffic light waiting to cross, and I just keep adding new people to the same sketch to create a group.

But this sketch was an actual scene of people watching a band at Otres Beach Saturday market.

Doing these as a continuous line sketch is a great way to create relationships and connections between the different figures. It’s easier to get the perspective and sizing right when you use the points where the bodies intersect, as reference points for a change in line direction. This is when sketching stops being about anatomical sketching, and becomes an exercise in seeing the lines, and connecting the shapes. And what you end up with is a believable group sketch. Sometimes these sketches can look messy and unorganised, but that’s when I use watercolour to establish boundaries and distinction between figures.

The key is not to give up because it’s looking crappy. Believe in your sketch. See it through to the end, and you’ll be very pleasantly surprised by the outcome—no matter how wonky or messy it is.

Sunburnt Bartender

I loved the perspective of this bartender, plus his wild and wooly beard and hair. The bright blob on his arm was a smudge from a facing page, but I just left it as a happy accident. He was a bit sunburned, and this just elevates the story.

This is one of my fabricated group scenes I mentioned about. I took loads of photos at the opening night of Mia Mia bar in Otres Beach. This bartender has a bar with drinks and optics behind him, but it was too much detail. I added the Drinks menu board to give a sense of place, so I didn’t need to include all the other distracting details. The line drawings of the people I added in the background were taken from different photos, and I left them black and white so they didn’t detract from the main focus of this picture—the bartender.

Feature Photo – Kep Crab Market, Cambodia

I didn’t really have a plan for this photo, I just started sketching. Consequently it’s missing a focal point, which should have been the man who is being pitched the crabs. I tried to fix it after the fact by giving him a bright orange jacket, but there’s too much going on around him for this to have worked effectively. The scene could have benefited from more white areas too.

To me, the most interesting part of this sketch is the checked hats the women are wearing. It was a cold, blustery, and wet day, and all women at the market were wearing similar hats. So figuring out a way to depict these to make them a focal feature would have created an iconic scene.

There’s no such thing as a bad sketch

Although I wasn’t happy with this sketch, I learnt a lot from it. And I can take those learnings into the next sketch I do. More White Areas and a Clear Focal Point—both key elements for every single urban sketch you do.

Practice for Urban Sketching

It’s not always possible to sketch from life, but that’s no excuse for dropping your daily sketch habit. Whether you use your own photos, or search online for sources, there’s plenty of inspiration to get you sketching to develop your art style.