Thursday, June 11, 2015

Flamenco Sketching. Pictures made by pen and paint.


A 3 hour search for angles, lighting, shapes, and textures. I guess more too, perhaps. (The music was great!) These are pen sketches colored with watercolour paints. I have joined the Vancouver Urban Sketchers as of Jan 2014 to inform my photography. So far, the sketching has been helped by my photography instincts. Hopefully after a few more years of urban sketching, it will feed back into the photos. I've really slowed down my process of observation... which is what I think film photography also does (I have not figured out a way to make myself take that jump with enough commitment yet). There are some unique qualities of sketch observations though. With sketching, you feel every line put down. And lighten with every distant boundary. You lean into every perspective. It's been an interesting journey into a neighboring visual expression.




3 Comments:

Blogger Warren T. said...

Hi Lea,

Thanks so much for sharing your ideas and creative process here with us. I love the multiple sketches and panels, like vignettes into your mind as you are observing the scene.

I've done sketching, and I get inspired to sketch very occasionally.

I like your analogy/link between sketching and film photography. In sketching though, I feel the process is more granular (the commitment to a drawn line), where in film photography (and by extension, all photography) is more holistic (you are capturing a whole frame at a time).

My photographic mind thinks almost the same way whether I'm shooting film or digital, but perhaps that is because I grew up shooting film, and that method is ingrained in my process.

Lea, can you explain what you mean by "leaning into a perspective"? I want to understand this more.

--Warren

Monday, June 15, 2015 at 9:57:00 AM PDT  
Blogger Lea said...

Thanks for the comment Warren. Its great to hear that you are mindful of the comparison between sketching and photographing.

Leaning into a perspective .. when perspective is more prominent (not in these figure drawings) I can sometimes find myself feeling pulled into an angle of a building. Yuko Shimizu teaches a Skillshare.com class called Mastering Inking: Basic and Pro Techniques. She personifies different marks and line as feminine and masculine. I found that very interesting, and it began to make sense the more I thought about it as I was drawing.

I agree with the granular vs holistic idea but also disagree slightly. When I took a charcoal drawing class, the teacher would say that you have to work on the entire picture all the time. If you forget about other parts, your consistency goes wonky. Perspective, tonality, scale, etc. And I have experienced that wonkyness to be true many times. So drawing can be a holistic experience, that appears granular. It's just moving at snail pace in comparison to photography. And running counter to photography being holistic is the dark room, and photoshop. Manipulations happen after the fact, and we call the end result a photograph (if it hasn't gone so far as to be called photographic art). But many hours, sometimes, have been put in to get it there.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015 at 8:12:00 AM PDT  
Blogger Lena said...

amazing ! artistic pen and paint of pictures, thanks for share...:-)

Lena

Tuesday, June 16, 2015 at 7:19:00 PM PDT  

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