This morning Benjamin and I went to our second Urban Sketch meetup! It wasn’t scary this time since I knew more what to expect. We met at Pier 66 and I picked the ‘water dinos’ since they’ve always captured my imagination. I liked the way they stood out along the horizon.
Some might think my composition includes too much boring water. But if you know me, you know I love water. So I liked the way it was framed between the two angles of the road in the foreground and harbor island in the background. I’d like to be able to draw and paint expressive water, but I can’t yet. It doesn’t mean it can’t still have a prominent place in my scene as I learn and practice though.
The dinos, being so far away, were very flattened to my eye. But I wanted to challenge myself to make them more 3-d to really examine them and understand how the beams and supports fit together, while also practicing the techniques I’m learning in my drawing class. So it was a worthy challenge. I spent most of my time on the dinos: drawing and hatching them.
Then I added a wash to the sky, which in the end made it too dark so I wished I hadn’t. But it was very gray and hazy today. Then I mixed colors for the tree-line, shipping crates, water and sky. I like the tree and crate colors very much and I enjoyed painting the stylized washes of color to give the illusion of the colorful stacked crates. The sky was too dark and not yellow enough and the water too light and not blue or silvery enough. But, I was running low on time and can’t adjust colors very quickly yet as it still takes a lot of thought about how to manipulate them on the color wheel.
Yesterday I spent some time on YouTube watching watercolor color-theory videos which was very helpful in mixing my colors today! My sky and water colors kept turning out too green, so I thought about those videos and worked my way closer to the shade I wanted while also introducing colors to adjust the shade and tone. Very cool stuff! But I need a lot more practice.
I used colored pencil on the dinos and yellow docking things.
Afterwards, Benjamin and I discussed our processes for our drawings and he gave me some feedback. He gave me recommendations for blending the treeline into the boxes and for grounding the dinos so they don't feel like they’re floating. He explained that if I’d left the street lamp in it would have helped tie the foreground into the background and also that I should have outlined my yellow pieces on the roadway. He also mentioned that adding in the fencing along the bottom would have been interesting.
So this gives me some concrete stuff to work on! Mixing colors, blending elements better on the page, grounding my objects, and composition. I kind of liked the lamp post, I just didn’t like that it was in the very middle of the picture. Benjamin suggested I could have moved it a little to the left to balance it while still keeping the visual interest. He’s so right! The fencing would have been nice but I ran out of time. And I didn’t outline the yellow colored pencil bits bc frankly I just forgot them as I rushed to finish. In the end my dinos were too dark because I hatched them and then added colored pencil, so I tried adding highlights, which is silly because they're so far away and my highlight pen is so [relatively] thick that it just made them look like they'd been snowed upon.
There's quite a lot I would change about this image, but what it comes down to is that I'm glad that I went and spent the time drawing and faced my fears of sharing my beginner's work with other more seasoned artists.