יום שלישי, 25 בספטמבר 2018

Urban sketchers Symposium 2018 in Porto I Part 3 The Workshops

The most challenging part of the Symposium is of course the workshops !
We receive a lot of information from the instructors. To have to deal with a timing plus being out of your comfort zone can be a bit overwelming…
I decided to be more relaxed this time than in my first symposium in Manchester where I put a lot of pressure on myself… I understood that I will have a whole year to practice the exercices… and that I am here essentially to have fun !
So here are the results of the different workshops I attented …

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First I went to Johanna Krimmel's true grit workshop : Painting directly with Chinese ink. Johanna made us test our brushes and papers after an interesting introduction about the specificities of different black inks. This technical part that we generally skip when we want to rush sketching a scene is so important because knowing your material will inspire you expressing yourself through textures and forms !

Here are the first quick exercices… for example:
Deep your brush in the ink, make a mark and then deep in the water again and again between each mark to see how your ink fades.
Try to make different thicknesses of line with the same brush.
Ink on dry paper, then on wet paper to see how the ink reacts.
Try to draw a lawn playing with your brush in small inequal lines.
Try your brush getting dryer and dryer… etc


I didn't do the next exercice so well, but the idea was to do quick thumbnails with the foreground dark and thick, then the second ground half tone and back grounds lighter and lighter…


And then the last exercice, the final painting, working on dark foreground and go gradually lighter and lighter to give a sens of the perspective.



I loved Johanna's workshop as well as her work and her kindness. I find very interesting the way this technique makes you travel inside the painting, entering the scene like a theater show will make you focus on the stage surrendered by the shade of the public.

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Second one was Charline Moreau's workshop : Beyond the trees, in the Virtudes Promenade. How to include a wooded foreground in order to enrich a panoramic view.
After her introduction, we worked on a quite elaborated black and white thumbnail in order to get familiar with subject and place the elements of the final painting.


Charline did a very nice demonstration using a limited palette of Indigo, Olive green, Burnt sienna and Permanent mauve. It was very interesting to start with the Indigo, placing the shadows and then go to green for the leaves, connecting the layers between each other in order to creat a gradual sense of light, mixing first the Indigo and the Olive green, before using the green. Then to go from cold colors to warm colors with the brown and enrich the shade with the mauve. To remember to be very light on the background to keep the perspective, using the same colors but diluated with a lot of water…


Thanks to Charline for her poetic and sensitive approach ! It will help me not to be afraid of trees anymore and even to use them as an essential part of my sketches !

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The third workshop was with Pedro Loureiro and it was a very funny one ! "The stories of public realm objects" made us focus on this numerous things, provided by municipality that we tend to erase from our sketches… To put them back in our urban drawings make them more real and alive than ever ! A bench, a lamp post, a tram, trafic light or sign, a bareer, public toilet, a cross walk… Pedro asked us to draw a quick map of this public objects and to give to each object a verb that will define its fonction…




Instead of placing everything on the floor, Pedro asked us to present our collection of objects in 1 minute only (Chrono in the hand !) and finally to choose one of the object and make a list of all the informations we can collect to speak about it : color, texture, utility, size, whatever… I chose the public toilet…


This is the funniest moment we had because sketchers chose very unexpected objects - sometimes absolutely useless - and made a great job describing their sketch and what they found out about them in only 1 mn.We ended up speaking as if we wanted to sell the object in an auction ! Then Pedro asked us to draw the interaction of the object with people…




Here I let my imagination go a little bit further than the actual reality… But I had a lot of fun and people stoped next to me in the street asking why I am laughing all alone doing my drawings… ! I became "the crazy one" from Porto !!!

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The last workshop I attended was Pedro Alves' Frame your sketch !
First we worked on black & white thumbnails using the rule of composition 1/3 - 2/3, horizontal and/or vertical to create a dynamic…


We tried then to decomplicate things, lines and colors, working with a limited palette of Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna. Thumbnails in color to prepare the final sketch. The idea was to frame the sketch with leaves, trees, dark elements… in order to focus the attention on a specific subject.

Then we worked in bigger… Warm tones on the focus point in the middle of the painting…
We framed the sketch with the cold color, Indigo, pure and dark. We tryed to do less lines in the foreground not to attract attention to the frame but to the subject (I made this mistake in my sketch… sorry !).


Thanks a lot to Pedro Alves, his talent and profesionnalism… It was good to be reminded of important (and sometimes forgotten) rules of composition and drawing. This method made a good echo to the workshop of Johanna Krimmel to make the viewer circulate into the painting, as well as Charline Moreau with her trees as foreground subject.

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I hope these amazing instructors won't be upset with my presentation of their workshop, I tried to remember , but mistakes are human! Thanks for their generosity and for sharing their talent with us…

I finish with 2 personal urban sketches from Porto I did in the great sketchbook handmade by Kitta Linares, where I also sketched the previous paintings from the workshops.



יום שלישי, 18 בספטמבר 2018

Urban Sketchers Symposium 2018 in Porto I Part 2

Porto became one of the favorite destination for tourism in Europe.
The city definitely deserves this attention for its beauty but also for the kindness of its locals !

I kept the sketchbook offered during the symposium by the sponsor LEUCHTTURM1917 to draw the people I met there. To remind me of the atmosphere between the sketchers during the symposium, portraiting people from all around the world, so happy to meet again in Porto…

Openning reception in Alfândega do Porto
Openning reception in Alfândega do Porto
Openning reception in Alfândega do Porto
Openning reception in Alfândega do Porto
Drink and draw meeting in Ribeira square
Drink and draw meeting in Ribeira square
Drink and draw meeting in Ribeira square
Final sketchcrawl in Praça da Liberdade
Final sketchcrawl in Praça da Liberdade
Closing reception in Alfândega do Porto
Closing reception in Alfândega do Porto
Closing reception in Alfândega do Porto • The 3 great correspondants
Closing reception in Alfândega do Porto
… Then I sketched also people in the streets, locals taking care of their guests or having a nice meal in a small restaurant.

Near Alfândega do Porto • Refugio 112
Near Alfândega do Porto • Refugio 112
Refugio 112 • 112 rua Armenia (Near Alfândega do Porto)
Nina, the daughter of the owner, watched me sketching the 2 previous drawings so I asked her to stand in front of me to do her portrait
Dona Arepa, Venezuelian food • 221 rua de Cedofeita
Churrasqueira • 136 Campo Martires da Patria
Thanks to all the organizers, the volunters
My last and next post about Porto will be about the workshops I attended… 

יום ראשון, 16 בספטמבר 2018

יציאת שרבוט לשוק נמל ת"א

שלושה חדשים עברו מאז המפגש האחרון של הקבוצה - וזה המוןןןן זמן! בלי הפגישות של הקבוצה שמדרבנות לצאת למדרכות ת"א היה לי קל להשאר כל הקיץ במזגן, להתעצל ולהחליד :) לכן המפגש אתמול בנמל ת"א היה כל כך משמח! היה כיף לפגוש את החברים הישנים, להכיר פנים חדשות, לשרבט ולהזיע :)

התחלתי בלונג שוט בפורמט גדול על גבי קופסאת קורנפלקס פרוסה. ציירתי, ציירתי וציירתי... והציור לא נגמר, אולי הגזמתי הפעם בגודל? התחלתי להילחץ שלא אספיק לצייר עוד נקודות מבט בשוק. אחרי שעה וחצי הצלחתי להשתלט על הקרטון שלי ולעבור הלאה. 



עשיתי כמה סיבובים ותפסתי כמה סקצ'ים מהירים של דמויות בשוק. 

נוכחות השרבטנים היתה מורגשת בשוק הלא גדול הזה, ישבנו בכל מקום פנוי וזכינו להתעניינות ידידותית מצד המוכרים והקונים. הפעם כמה מנשואי הציורים שלי ביקשו ממני לקבל את הציורים "שלהם"... אבל אני, רכושנית שכמותי, סירבתי בנימוס :)



היה כיף לחזור לפעילות, תודה למרינה על הארגון!

יום רביעי, 12 בספטמבר 2018

Urban Sketchers Symposium 2018 in Porto I Part 1


In July took place in Porto, Portugal the 9th Symposium of Urban sketchers. I was lucky enough to be there and enjoy the beauty of the city and the kindness of the locals ! The city offers many angles to sketch, it's very colorfull, light and shades are very contrasted due to the sun but also because of the narrow small streets. It always takes time for me to figure out what techniques to use to describe and be truthfull towards what I have in front of my eyes… Here are my sketches, trying different approaches in my Moleskine sketchbook.


Lamy fountain pen ink and watercolor
Lamy fountain pen ink and watercolor
Lamy fountain pen ink and watercolor
Watercolor and watercolor pencils
Watercolor and watercolor pencils
Here is a funny story… I did this following drawing from the window of my guesthouse the first day I arrived. The building on the other side of the street was a ruin and the roof full of holes. The windows were broken but still, but you could still see the beauty of the windows… 

Watercolor and watercolor pencils
… Workers started to come the next morning and demolish the roof… 5 days later, I did another drawing:  the roof totally disappeared and I could discover the iron work of the staircase inside. 
Does this building still exist today ?

Lamy fountain pen ink and watercolor
I tryed here to work in direct watercolor, which is not my habit…

Watercolor
Watercolor
Watercolor
And to finish this post, I want to show you a playfull attempt with ink and collage, stealing my son's (used) origami papers to evokes the azulejos of Porto, the colorful ceramics on the buildings…

Pentel brush pen and collage
Japanese brush pen and collage
Collage with origami paper
I guess that you will wonder where is the huge amount of people I could meet in Porto… In a next post, I will show the sketches I did of the funny faces of tourists, sketchers and locals I drew in the LEUCHTTURM1917 sketchbook offered by the sponsor during the symposium !