It was a sunny and cheerful Friday morning. The ground was damp from a light rain the night before and the Urban Sketch Seattle group met at the library in the Queen Anne neighborhood. After our initial round-up, I headed straight over to the pink Methodist church because I'm so enamored with it's pink-ness!
I sat myself up on a retaining wall diagonally across the street from the church and began doing my pencil plan. In my Ink & Watercolor class, we were encouraged to keep our pencil plan to 60-seconds so as to stay loose and not get bogged down in perfectionistic details. For my first two USK visits, I stuck to that plan and strove to loosely follow the model of that class (60-second-pencil-plan, inking in contours, putting tone in using ink-wash, and glazing in the color with watercolors). I'd never drawn on location before and both times (and also due to my lack of experience) I inadvertently selected challenging subjects (trying to fit in too much subject matter the first meetup and not enough in the second). I was disappointed with both of those drawings.
By the third meetup I started to hit my stride. I selected a lovely old building that I was quite smitten with upon first glance. I've long loved old buildings and I happily sat myself down to spend time with this one. For the first time I felt I'd found the right balance in my subject of 'enough but not too much.' I knew I wanted it to turn out well and liked that it was mostly a box-shape. I began by using what I'd been learning in my Observational Drawing class. I ran into some trouble with perspective, and worked and reworked it, but when I couldn't get it just right, I gave myself permission to move on because I knew I needed to get started on inking it.
I spent a full hour on my pencil plan. This didn't worry me, as I felt my plan was so solid I should be able to ink it in quickly enough to finish the drawing in the remaining 1.5 hours. I worked diligently and squinted to see all of the details in the brickwork which lended to it's charm. I had to quickly problem-solve how to give the appearance of bricks (both vertical and horizontal) when I was starting to run out of time. I felt tempted to avoid the messy garage before deciding that it lended too much visual interest and that if I left it stylized but based on some things I could see in it, that it would be easy enough to render in time.
I finished just in time and it wasn't until I came out of my delicious drawing frenzy that I realized I'd only drawn the building itself without any context whatsoever! It was floating in midair! I'd honestly been so absorbed in the beauty of the building and it's detailing that I hadn't even considered any of its surroundings at all! After the throwdown, where we all shared our drawings, I went back to my perch and kept working. I wanted the building to have something proper to sit on. I penciled out some of the contextual surroundings and then took a break for lunch. I came back and got everything inked in and left with an unfinished (nothing on the sign above the garage, none of the towering trees behind) drawing that I felt quite satisfied with.
Week 3 was my first experience with merging the skills I'd been learning in my Observational Drawing class with my Ink & Watercolor class. It was the first time I gave myself permission to take the guidelines given to me by each of my instructors (one approaching from a detailed, highly-accurate, realistic perspective, and one coming from an approachable, loose, empoweringly forgiving, stylized perspective) and combine them into an approach that works for me.
Here's the thing. I don't have a lot of drawing experience really at all. My eyes are barely trained in seeing things in a way that allows me to interpret them on a 2-D page. I am very much a beginner. So if I want to have a drawing that I'm proud of it's going to take me a while to dial in and interpret what I'm seeing in a way that can be believably rendered. I need more than a 60-second pencil plan! However, I also don't have any interest in creating highly-realistic drawings. I want my approach to be stylized and an interpretation of what I'm seeing.
So, this is all of the learning and experience that I brought with me to this fourth meetup when I sat down in front of the little pink church. I spent a decent amount of time on my pencil plan, making sure I was seeing angles and proportion and scale reasonably well. But I also didn't let myself get hung up on it. I blended the approaches of my two instructors. This resulted in a drawing that I'm really proud of, but that also has some personality to it. The cross is a great example: I found the 3-D nature of it very challenging, but I sketched it out as best I could, working hard to see it as my Obsv. Drawing teacher taught me to assess things, but not overworking it to perfection and instead committing as best as I could and getting it inked in. The result is a cross that is believably 3-D and also one that has some wonky personality to it! I didn't know how to do the front steps, so I just thought about what I knew steps to look like from my O.D. class and inked it in like a champ. They look convincingly great!
The truth is that this church actually has a winding ramp with rails leading up to the front door, and an awning coming off of the alcove on the right side. They didn't make it in because I realized my initial layout hadn't left enough room for all that railing. I also wasn't confident about putting it in anyway, so I didn't mind that there wasn't room for it. The awning kind of flew under my radar long enough that I missed it at first and just left it that way. Delightfully, I liked the way my drawing was coming together so I didn't mind the way this interpretation worked out with those missing pieces. Though I do find it very interesting the things that we just don't see sometimes! (Case in point: there should also be another smaller tree in the grass median on the right-hand side. I was stunned to discover its existence after 2 hours of staring at this scene!)
After the throw down, I did return to put in some more window detailing in the bell-tower and on the left-hand side. That was the beginning of the left-hand side getting too overworked, which I then made worse by overworking it some more. That was a valuable lesson learned.
I stopped short of adding in the brickwork on the bell-tower or any of the dark roof tiles because I decided I'd like for this to be my first hybrid piece! I'm pleased enough with how it turned out that I am thinking of giving it as a Christmas gift to a couple who I know love this church. So I wanted to preserve it as it is, scan it in, then print out a few copies to test some different roof and brick textures on before deciding how I want to add in that detail. I will also digitally erase the mess on the left-hand side and sort out what detail should be left in and what should be removed so as to better understand how to interpret multiple layers (tree, shrub, window) in pen and ink so that it looks believable to the viewer and not like a mess. (I think I'll handle it like I did on the right hand side where that tree obscures the building in full, which looks very believable).
Once these decisions are made, I will make a fresh ink drawing based from this original piece and add color. It's an ambitious project, but I'm feeling optimistic. And I'm super excited about integrating some tech into my process and seeing what I learn from that adventure.
So this is the story of my Fourth USK meetup. But it's also the story of learning to integrate teaching methodologies into a process that works for me at my current level of ability. Blending these two approaches has increased my confidence and my sense of agency. I'm starting to make work I'm really proud of and I'm enjoying the process of creating it.
