For the fifth Urban Sketching lesson, the class met up at Casa Feliz Historic Home Museum. However, I’m exceptionally bad at nagivation, so I struggled to find the place even with Google Maps help. I think I circled the area three times (and then called one of the other classmates) before I finally found the place.
There was an Orlando Urban Sketchers meetup event right after class inside Casa Feliz, and even though a few of my classmates joined the meetup to sketch, I wasn’t finished with my first sketch at the time (partially due to my late start) so I stayed outside to complete it. I’m glad I did because this sketch is among my favorites from the Urban Sketching course.
Casa Feliz really is quite lovely; I definitely intend to go back some time for more sketching. I think I should be able to find it better this time. I hope.
July 2018 Orlando Cars and Coffee event in Winter Park, FL
For the third lesson of the Urban Sketching course, the class attended the Orlando Cars and Coffee event hosted at Donut Central & Fuelpresso. Our assignment was to sketch at least one car with a few people around it. Choosing one car among the many unique, colorful, and cool cars was a challenge in and of itself, but it was even harder to find one with a decent place to sit in the shade (I have since learned my lesson and now have a portable chair). And, when I finally picked one, sat down, and set up my supplies…the car owner packed up and drove away.
The sketch above is the second car I chose. By the time I finally got started, the class had only one hour left before we would return to the Crealde classroom. And then, another car pulled in to the parking spot next to it and blocked my view for at least 20 minutes. Despite the obstacles and the short time frame, I think it turned out pretty well, and it might be one of my favorite sketches from the course. I don’t know much about cars so I’m afraid I don’t recall what the make or model is, but I have a penchant for blue cars and really enjoyed painting it. The owner of the car (the guy in the blue shirt) seemed to like my painting too and asked to take a picture of it.
Date: 7/8/18
Time spent: 1 hour
Donut Central & Fuelpresso
The following week, the class went back to Donut Central & Fuelpresso to sketch the inside of the café. While I was there, I ordered a red velvet donut and a macchiato latte. Both were delicious! Highly recommended!
I went to Mt. Dora on the last day of my 4th of July vacation. Despite living less than an hour away from Mt. Dora, I’ve never actually visited it before. I was inspired by my sunset beach painting to try a sunrise painting of the Mt. Dora Lighthouse. Surprisingly, this was more challenging than painting a sunset. The colors in the sky and the shadows cast from the sunrise shifted faster than the sunset. I typically wait until I completely finish inking my sketch before I crack open my watercolor set, but this time I was simultaneously inking and painting in a flurry, trying to keep up with the sun.
Date: 7/7/18
Time spent: 1.75 hours
One Flight Up Café
One Flight Up is a cozy, two-story café in the Mt. Dora historic district. After finishing my sunrise paint, I walked around the historic district to look for another interesting subject to sketch. I saw the café’s balcony and thought it would be a fun, new challenge to draw the street from above. As I worked on this sketch, one of the waitresses stopped by to watch me work and told me about how impressed she was with my sketch. Soon, other patrons in the café started walking up to see me work, telling me that I was “getting rave reviews” from the staff.
I was still on “holiday” right after Independence Day, so it was a rare opportunity for me to ride SunRail. I lived in Japan for three years, and I miss the JR and riding trains daily. I still don’t understand why SunRail can’t have more evening or weekend hours. I’d love to use it on weekends to spend a day downtown and avoid having to take I-4 (a hot mess) and find parking (also a nightmare). I also don’t understand why they only built a North-South line and no other lines, but I digress.
The first place I stopped to draw was Lake Eola. It’s not my strongest composition since I was too focused on getting everything to look exactly how I saw it…so I didn’t really think about how awkward the cut-off tree would look or how the fountain should be closer to the center. Which is a pity, because I think I did a great job painting the fountain.
Date: 7/5/18
Time spent: 2 hours
Street view near City Hall
As I was walking down S. Orange Ave, I found a little table outside a Dunkin Donuts. I figured this was as good a place as any to sketch. However, I learned pretty quickly that busy street views were a bit too challenging for me at this time. There was so much to squeeze into one drawing, and once I was an hour into the sketch and no where near being ready to ink or paint, I decided to try something different. I kept the pencil sketch and used my Tombow brush pens to create some much needed value contrast and definition. I rather like the look I achieved with this one, and it’s easily my favorite sketch from the day. This sketch looks energetic and full of motion.
Time spent: 1.5 hours
Quick sketch on Church Street
Once I arrived at the Church Street Sunrail station, I had an extra 40 minutes to kill before boarding my train, so I found something quick and easy to sketch. Well, relatively quick and easy; still not a fan of drawing stairs. As I inked the sketch and prepared it for watercolor, I used Tombow brush pens to draw in the railing. This was a mistake. I had forgotten that the brush pen ink was water soluble, so when I began adding the watercolor wash, the brush pen ink bled everywhere.
Since then, I’ve been a LOT more careful about waiting until the very end to use the brush pens. Give me another few months, and I’m sure I’ll make the same mistake again. Feel free to make bets on when that will be.
Starting a new drawing is always the hardest part for me. Even if I draw a thumbnail to lay out my ideal composition, I struggle to get it right when I try to fill out the whole page. When I started working on this one, I knew that I wanted the two women on the left and the fountain on the right to be in the composition. I wish I had started sketching everything a bit smaller so that the fountain doesn’t get cut off like that, but I had already spent far too much time and was eager to finish the painting before it got stupid hot. Because Florida.
I rather like the splotchy watercolor effect I achieved on the trees in the background. Not sure how I did that. I’m less pleased with how I painted the water in and cascading from the fountain. I’m still relatively inexperienced with using watercolor, and I wish I planned out how to paint the fountain better. Watercolor is too translucent for me to add white highlights to the water drips and ripples, and my white gel pen didn’t do much better either. Perhaps I should start packing white gouache along with my watercolors.
Stairs are the worst. It’s important for me to acknowledge this here, considering how much time I wasted drawing, erasing, and redrawing them.
There are few things on Earth I find more beautiful than sunsets, so for this sketch, I was determined to capture a sunset at Clearwater Beach. I knew it would be a bit of a challenge since the light and the colors would shift relatively quickly as I worked, but it turned out the most difficult part would be finding parking! Once I settled down in a good spot, I got to work right away to make up for the time I lost in my quest for a legal parking spot.
Several of the focal points in my painting, such as the umbrellas over the picnic tables and the food stall, were put away and closed down within 20 minutes of my arrival, and I’m glad I managed to capture them in time because they are my favorite elements in this painting, along with the colors in the sky and ocean. However, there were still many people arriving at the beach after me, so I definitely wasn’t the only one coming to the beach to enjoy the sunset. In fact, there was a group of guys who showed up to record a vlog of some kind. They were somewhere behind me so I wasn’t able to get them into my painting, but I could hear them rehearse their message and re-record every time someone forgot a line or if the lighting was poor.
I’m quite proud of how this one turned out, and the beach was a really nice, relaxing setting for working on a painting. I wish I could’ve stayed longer to start a second one, but soon after I finished this one, I saw there was a thunderstorm rapidly approaching and knew it was time to pack up and hurry back to my car. I imagine I looked quite ridiculous sprinting out of the beach with a collapsible beach chair and my non-waterproof shoulder bag slung over my back and flapping around behind me, but I was determined to not let all of the paintings in my sketchbook get ruined from the rain!
This summer, I decided to try something new artistically and signed up for Urban Sketching classes at Crealde School of Art (taught by Thomas Thorspecken). Drawing backgrounds and perspective have always been a struggle of mine as an artist, as well as drawing quickly and not being afraid to make mistakes. I had hoped that the class would help me improve in these areas and learn new techniques, but a part of me was afraid that the class would frustrate me and cause me to give up entirely. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, and I enjoyed Urban Sketching from the start.
After the first couple lessons, I wanted to make the most of what I was learning, so I decided to spend my 4th of July vacation visiting a different city each day (St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Tampa, Orlando, and Mt. Dora) and complete at least one Urban Sketch per location. My first trip was to St. Petersburg. Naturally, I had to visit the Salvador Dali Museum.
I thought an art museum would be a great choice for sketching since no one would be bothered by or surprised to see an artist drawing in an art museum, but it proved to be a bit more of a challenge than I expected. There weren’t many benches or places to sit in the main exhibit, and when I finally found one with an open seat facing some paintings, I took it immediately. However, due to the shortage of seating in the exhibit, I decided to render my sketch in a quick grayscale instead of watercolor so that I wouldn’t hog the seat for too long.
The two women in the center of the sketch are looking at a painting titled “Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid” (no idea how to pronounce a portmanteau that portentous). This painting is immense in size, and my sketch barely included a fourth of it. The museum provides an audio guide to explain the background and meaning behind the surreal imagery in Dali’s paintings, and all of the visitors in my sketch are using the audio guides. I had one as well, but the device was not working very well and the audio would cut in and out unless I held the audio jack tightly in place. The third woman on the right of the sketch is viewing “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.” I cannot recall which painting was in the frame on the lefthand side of my sketch. Sorry, Dali.
