2 Very Different Urban Sketches
This morning, I had several hours in Point Richmond while waiting for my daughter's class to end. Since I wasn't able to do a detailed interior sketch yesterday at Tender Greens, I decided to make that a priority today and went to Kaleidoscope Coffee.
This independent cafe is a major improvement over the Starbucks up the road! Here were my choices for possible views to draw.
So many great choices! I ended up choosing the view looking towards the back as I had already unpacked a lot of my art supplies on a table in the window in the front (if I finished quickly, I could sketch my view outside the window). Also, this view captures the great kaleidoscope-like artwork on the wall and ceiling.
I practiced using Steven Reddy's techniques from his Craftsy class, Sketching Interiors: Structure, Detail & Play. First, you need to consider several vantage points from which to sketch, then, make a thumbnail compositional sketch - identifying the foreground, middle ground, and background. Next, you block in the major shapes of your sketch in pencil and then, do a contour drawing of all the tangible edges in your sketch. After that, you apply a series of ink washes (1) a 25% India ink solution over all areas that are not white in your sketch, (2) a second application of the 25% solution over areas that you wish to darken from your first pass, (3) a final application of a 75% India ink solution on the darkest areas of your sketch.
Here is my sketch after following all of the above steps:
Steven often stops at this stage, but I continued with his two final steps: (1) adding a limited palette of watercolor glazes (which I added to because I don't really like the limited palette effect), and (2) adding hatching for darkest and texture. Here is my final version.
I had about 15 minutes left before I needed to pick up Chloe, so I went outside and did a quick urban sketch using my waterproof Kuretake sable brush pen and my watercolors. This took me about 20 minutes from start to finish and yes, the girls complained when I picked them up 10 minutes late!