Title : Partying with Sketcherman, Chinese Twigging with Kiah Kiean and Coming Home with Simo Capecchi
link : Partying with Sketcherman, Chinese Twigging with Kiah Kiean and Coming Home with Simo Capecchi
Partying with Sketcherman, Chinese Twigging with Kiah Kiean and Coming Home with Simo Capecchi
[By Rita Sabler, Symposium Correspondent, in Porto]
People Party in Porto! with Rob Sketcherman
Any good artist can show you how to correctly draw human proportion, but only Rob can make you dance it. Sketcherman’s energy is contagious and his tips are so useful even when one’s head is spinning from the overload of information on the last day of the symposium.
Rob has masterfully covered a lot of territory in less than an hour I was listening in on his workshop. First step was understating how to correctly size up a resting figure. Turns out if we use a human head as our basic measuring unit there are two “heads” between our chin and our navel, one “head" between our navel and our crotch, another two "heads" between our crotch and our knees and and another two "heads" between our knees and the floor. 1-2-1-2-2! Rob made us sign and dance the rhythm several times to literally get it into our bodies. The same formula can be applied to any pose, including sitting and walking ones.
Next it was time to slice up the human head like a pizza pie. We quickly moved on to simplifying figures into basic shapes. Rob’s advice is to not get intimidated by all the detail and start with basic building blocks–rectangles, triangles and circles before fleshing out details.
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| Slicing and dicing human proportions with Rob Sketcherman |
Sketcherman showed us how to use quick gestural sketches to practice drawing people.
Finally, it was time for the most interesting part of the lesson–how to pick details that tell a story. Here are some tips:
1. Pick people of different shapes and sizes–it will add more visual interest to your sketch.
2. Look how people’s personalities could be conveyed with the posture and accessories
3. Use gestures as much as you can, as they can show what kind of relationship your subject has to their surroundings
Finally, if you don’t like what you see add some stripes, dots, and patterns to make things interesting!
Kiah Kiean’s Sketching with Dry Twig & Chinese Ink
Conveniently for me, right across from Rob Sketcherman the virtuoso artist Kiah Kiean was unpacking his supplies that he brings every year for all of his workshop students: a big box of Chinese twigs that his father picks in his garden for Kiah Kiean students, a little round container with gauze to hold the ink, and a bigger box for dry washes to be used with a brush. Kiah Kiean uses a very unique approach to making his stunning sketches.
Step 1: Make lines with a sharpened twig on hot press watercolor paper by dipping a twig into a contained with gauze saturated in Chinese ink.
Step 2: Use a brush dipped into a sponge barely holding any ink to quickly apply rough textures and depth around lines.
Step 3: Apply watercolor.
Seems easy enough? Not so much. Here is my sketch of the workshop and a little attempt at sketching Kiah Kiean style.
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| Kiah Kiean’s Sketching with Dry Twig & Chinese Ink |
I was really looking forward to seeing one of Kiah Kiean’s famous jaw dropping demos on location but it was time to run in order to cover my last workshop of the symposium.
Simo Capecchi’s One page says it all. A reportage on Porto wine
Having taken Simo’s workshops before I already knew turning the delivery of her students to their location into an adventure is part of Simonetta’s elaborate plan. Once in Brazil I felt like we were possibly being kidnapped when she took all of her workshop participants in a safari style open van to an unknown location far away from the town of Paraty, where we learned and sketched cachaça production plant.
This time in Porto I was to catch a water taxi in order to cross Douro and arrive to the neighborhood of Ribeira de Gaia where Simonetta was teaching a workshop on one page reportage on Porto wine. Being extremely pressed for time and trying to make it to her location before the workshop was over I had my own James Bond moment running with my sketchbook to catch a water taxi, jumping into one in the last minute as if being chased by a villain, and finally arriving in style just as the students were finishing their one page story.
Simonetta has been producing gorgeous one page reportage stories for a travel magazine Dove, using her watercolors and hand written stories to illustrate such topics production of tortellini in Bologna, or construction of sail boats in Venice.
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| Marking the reportage of the reportage: My attempt to quickly sum up my experience Simo style |
This time Simonetta put her students in the visual reporter’s shoes asking them to make a one page spread detailing the story of Porto wine using the panorama of Porto in front of them as an impactful image, using Rabelo boats in the water in front of them along with wine cellars and shops along the waterfront as main story points. Students had to learn how to effectively combine writing and drawing.
It was a perfect last workshop to cover for me because Simonetta’s artwork and approach always feel like “coming home” for me. They are warm, sweet and are exactly where I want to be.
I spent my lunch break catching up with the delightful friends–Silvio Menendez, Maru Godas, and her husband Ramon working on a sketchbook spread for a special birthday gift for Nelson Paciencia. It was a pleasant break from being locked up in my room writing blog reports while scarfing cups of dry noodles.
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| Lunch sketch of Maru Godas and Silvio Menendez |
Closing Reception
Soon it was time for get ready for the most bittersweet moment of the whole event–the closing reception. I couldn’t believe it was over. Due to lack of sleep, so many amazing talented and kind people that I wanted to talk to, and so much sketching it felt like one day instead of four.
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My fellow correspondent Marina had a brilliant idea for our final reportage piece we would draw together with her in a concertina sketchbook filling the ends simultaneously until we meet in the middle. Soon our third correspondent Paulo Mendez joined in, and the party really got going.
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| Collaborative concertina of the closing reception |
We filled tow concertinas with colorful portraits and captions from the participants who came to socialize over excellent Portuguese wine, bet on the amazing array of silent auction sketches, and the most climactic moment of the event–the announcement of the next symposium location.
What a fantastic conclusion to this magical week. See you in Amsterdam in 2019!
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