Stillman & Birn Alpha (3×5), Esterbrook J9550
Yesterday I talked about Karen Casper coming to town and the beginnings of our sketching adventure together. We’d agreed to meet the next morning (Thursday) near Parliament and when I arrived she’d already started a quick sketch of some of the windows. Knowing that I only had a couple minutes to do one, I did this small sketch of one of the lamp posts. Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of Karen’s sketch.
Then, off we went, chattering away as we headed into the old city. We ended up in Place D’Youville and this church steeple caught Karen’s eye as did a convenient place to sit. All it required was that I buy a cup of coffee. The sacrifices I make for sketching…
Karen uses white space to great effect here and this was just one of the “somethings” I learned this morning.
Here’s mine. The steeple is seen between two buildings and Karen’s simple depiction of this is far superior to my own. Stillman & Birn Beta (6×9)
We mixed some touristing, some sketching philosophy discussions, some anthropology talk and some general kibbitzing in with our sketching day but ultimately our wandering took us to the Canadian Customs building, something that Karen wanted to see.
From a sketcher point of view these are pretty great buildings. The day was boiling hot so we required shade for sketching, found some, and we did these sketches of the large dome on one of the buildings.
Karen uses color with more freedom than I do. I’m still stuck in “if it looks like a pig, paint the color of a pig” mode but here Karen’s color choices are magnificent, don’t you think?
Here’s mine. Stillman & Birn Beta (6×9), Esterbrook J9550
By the time we finished it was time to head back towards her hotel and for me to get home myself. We wanted to take the ferry the next morning so we could sketch Quebec from the other side of the St. Lawrence River so we agreed to meet at the same place the next morning. On to day three…
Very interesting to see the contrast between two different styles of sketching. I love looking at them both.
I agree, Diane. In fact, I’ll go further and say that I think one of the really great things about urban sketching and other forms of ‘social’ sketching is that we get to compare our work to others. We get to see different approaches made by other artists to the same subject that we’re drawing. We can assess what those artists get from making the choices they do and, maybe more important, cause us to think about our own choices and why we make them. — Larry