October 27 ^th

At some point in my life, I decided I enjoyed drawing. However, I do not draw a lot.

I do not do it, because I think I’m not very good at it. I know it’s paradoxical, but that’s not the full story. You see, to get better at drawing one must practice, practice a lot actually. The thing is, I like to urban sketch, to go out and draw/paint things I see, which makes it not so easy to practice. You’re probably thinking “ok, I kinda get it, but going outside isn’t that hard, so what’s the problem?”, and that’s a really good question.

The problem is that when I set out to go and draw/paint something, I end up searching for (1) the perfect place to sit, (2) that is comfortable, (3) that protects me from the sun and the rain, (4) that isn’t too overcrowded, (5) with the perfect thing to draw, (6) one that’s not too difficult, (7) that has easy colors, (8) that is interesting, (9) that isn’t like things I’ve drawn before, and five more things that need to be perfect that I can’t remember right now.

This needs to change, and I’ve got a plan.

Right now I’m on vacation, spending time at my SO’s place in Brussels, Belgium. She’s currently working some ~1.5km from here, and I gonna meet her for lunch.

The plan is to bring my sketching tools and spend some time around the city sketching stuff. Given the nine points I explained previously, this sounds like a recipe for failure, but my goal today is to not overthink it. I’m going to give myself 3 minutes to sketch out my composition (e.g. make some thumbnails), probably with a pencil. After that, I have 5 minutes to draw it, and (optionally) an additional 5 minutes to paint it. In the end, I must repeat this process for five different subjects, which with some quicks maths should take me about two hours (assuming I take fifteen minutes between finding different subjects). In summary:

For five different subjects:

• 3 minutes to plan composition
• 5 minutes to sketch it
• 5 minutes to paint it (optional)

That’s the plan, see you soon with the results.

I did get out of the house to paint, in the afternoon, except when the first 3-minute alarm went off, I wasn’t nearly finished planning. I also certainly didn’t spend only five minutes sketching it, and I’m even more certain that I didn’t paint it. See the result below.

The central police station in Brussels, Belgium

Be that as it may, I don’t consider this effort a failure, since it did force me to get out of the house and sketch. The drawing is not half-bad unless you’ve actually been to the central station. Also, censoring the policemen, although on theme, was a cop-out (badum tsss!) because I botched the left one’s face during the drawing.

To not make half of this post a complete failure, I’m going to try to still complete the challenge, I got until Sunday anyway.

October 29 ^th

I didn’t do it. At least not five times. I did the challenge (almost) once. Me and my SO went to a patisserie (basically a fancy pastry shop) and bought two pastries. We then sat down in a park where I started to do the challenge. Thirty seconds after the beginning of the sketching phase the groundskeeper came to inform us that the park was closing for the day and that we had to leave.

I ended up finishing it at home. Here is the result:

It tastes far better than it looks. Colorful things are fruit.

Not bad… also, on Thursday night we went out for a walk and passed by the Manneken Pis¹ and I challenged her to do a quick sketch. One thing we have in common is that we don’t deal well with pressure, and the sketch shows it. Anyway, today I tried to do it myself, at home, and this is the outcome (in ink).

Call child protection services, someone hit the Manneken!.

I know it looks like someone struck the boy in the face, and that he has a beard. But it doesn’t look half bad. The experiment was a success, see you all next week!