I continue to learn to loosen up with my sketching… I have painted realistic skies in the past. But with a couple Vienna photo references from class exercises that Oliver Hoeller gave us, I tried skies with different colors.
Here is another sketch of his photo reference of a building on a street corner–
I have also ventured out on my own to sketch in my own town. Unfortunately, the architecture in my town is not as cool as that in Vienna, but I found things to sketch anyway! The first sketch I did was of a local restaurant with outdoor dining. I was attracted to the umbrellas flapping in the wind. I sat in my car with the AC running, as it was 90+ degrees. I wanted to show how hot the scene looked, so I abandoned some of the local color and used oranges and yellows deliberately.
I drove across the street to a strip mall. There was a construction site and I saw a bright blue Porta-potty. I often sketch these, I don’t know why, I think it’s their shapes and colors that grab me. A distance away, there was a large parked construction machine, and I liked the yellow color. So I combined both into one sketch, but changed the color of the potty to purple.
I am also working a little differently with tools. Instead of a water brush (which has a smaller brush tip and less water, thus makes my sketches tighter), I have gone back to a larger dagger brush and water, which I use to add fast washes and spatters. I find this way of adding color takes less time, as I splash paint on and rub around. I am also realizing that the sketch with its darker pen values and adjusted line weights shoulders more of the value scale, so less has to be done with color. All these discoveries have been quite fun and eye-opening!
It was a fun loose sketch, and I accomplished what I wanted— trying my hand at loosening up with color!