Still Life – Urban Sketcher Style

When my knee problem started to limit my walking, I started thinking of alternative ways to feed my penchant for moving pointy devices across paper.  One alternative was to sign up for one of several ateliers offered here by La Collectif, here in Quebec.  These aren’t instructional and mostly about drawing nude models and portraits.  I’m not much interested in that sort of thing but they did have one atelier called Nature Morte (Still Life).

I decided that drawing vegetables and wine bottles would be a lot more fun than sitting on my couch so I signed up.  There are twelve of us in the atelier, which is organized by Celine and Robert Poiré, two of my favorite people in the Collectif so I know it will be fun.  This first week I sort of had to grit my teeth to muddle along because the pain made it hard to concentrate but we had fun nevertheless.  Heck, we were sketching, we couldn’t avoid having fun if we tried.

Here’s my sketch from the session.  I’m not sure that my pen and ink, cartoon style is the best for drawing vegetables and maybe I’ll take some pencils with me next week.

After a short break there was still a few minutes left in the session and others were still finishing up their drawings so I decided to do a quick experiment.  I got a piece of Bristol from my bag and gave myself 2-minutes to capture the same scene I’d just drawn.  I’ll let you assess how I did, but I had a lot of fun doing it.  With the remaining minutes I scribbled out some poor depictions of some of the participants.  Can’t wait for next week.

4 thoughts on “Still Life – Urban Sketcher Style

  1. I like both drawings — one is careful and studied, the other more spontaneous. And fun that you got to do a still life that someone else arranged! (I get bored with the produce in my own house) Hope your knee is getting better!

    – Tina

    • Yeah, me too. I really enjoy the process of detailed line drawings but also the thrill of capturing something quickly. I do the two-minute sketch drill often because it’s fun and because it forces me to think in terms of major masses.

      My leg/knee is getting better. In fact, my leg has started looking like a leg again rather than a telephone pole 🙂 Most of the pain is gone too, but I’m constantly tired right now. — Larry

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