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Sketching my travels 1 – whys and wherefores

April 8, 2015 by Lin Kerr 2 Comments

Please join me on my urban sketching challenge! My goals: capturing the moment; drawing people; energy and colour in the sketch; urban sketching; a filled sketchbook; telling a story. 

This will be for a month and I leave for Australia on Monday 13 April. Dave is keeping the homefires burning, while I flit about, teach, brother’s wedding and visit Swedish-Singaporian granddaughters (7 & 4)  Australia – Singapore – Australia and home!

I’m scarily going public because I think this will motivate me – and anyway it’s only for one month. Let’s see if my drawing loosens up and I find my sketching voice.
My first move was to buy two books by Gabriel Campanario.
05-04-15 urban sketching book1-72

I’m trying to work out why I want to do this.
Here are some ideas…
My drawing is quite intense and tight. We calligraphers spend so much time being precise that its difficult to be expressive.(dripped backgrounds and wild lettering is not really what I mean by expressive – that is more gestural.)
Drawing is the backbone of all art.
I’m still figuring out what my style is.
I studied art during a time of abstraction and hard-edge. Although we did life drawing daily for 3 years, the rest was design and we were all rude about realism and landscape painting! I’d like to rethink this appalling attitude..
I’d love to be able to draw a group of people in a cafe.
Camparino’s books show lots of different styles by various urban sketchers – it would be cool to develop a signature sketching style and there is plenty of inspiration.

Where does this fit in with calligraphy? I haven’t a clue! But somehow in the end every art experience feeds into the artist, whether it is visiting galleries, looking at art, trying different things etc.

One of my dreams: I’m going to do more Chinese life drawing in June and I would like to produce a book in collaboration with a poet. I certainly think that practising drawing people will help this. On the last course with Qu-lei-lei, we did about 30 – 40 drawings of mostly 2-5 minute poses, using a brush, pen, pencil etc. This seems a good way to go calligraphically – BUT I am also trying to stay open…

 

 

 

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Comments

  1. Carole Dow says

    April 8, 2015 at 9:54 am

    Lin this is so exciting – and brave! have a wonderful trip. i can’t wait to see what it brings forth – creatively that is xxx

    Reply
  2. Edwina Hughes says

    April 9, 2015 at 7:43 am

    Good luck Lin. I do find it hard to keep my sketching going and agree with you that the Chinese approach helps to bring spontaneity and movement into drawing. I remember when I took my sketch book to a theatre to draw ‘water dancers’ I was really able to get the flow of line because their movements were so fast. Happy travelling – looking forward to following your progress. x

    Reply

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