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.