Finally drew a person properly in a sketch instead of waiting for them to leave
Small thing, but it's been sitting with me all week.
I've been sketching at the old market near Avenue Road for months now. Same three vegetable sellers, same crates, same blue tarpaulin. And every single time someone walks into my frame I do the same cowardly thing: I look down, wait, and hope they move off. Which means three years of urban sketching and my sketchbooks are full of beautiful empty streets that don't exist.
Anyway, Thursday I just drew the man. Sat down on the low stone step, ink first like always, and instead of waiting I just caught him where he was, mid-argument with the auto driver about parking. Took maybe forty seconds. His shoulders are slightly wrong and I gave him one leg too many folds in the lungi, but he's there. He's in the drawing.
The odd part is the whole page came alive after that. The crates stopped being an exercise in perspective and started being a place where something happened.
I don't know why it took me this long. I think some part of me was treating people as interruption rather than as the actual subject. Architect habit maybe, buildings don't fidget.
Anyone else here guilty of the empty-street sketchbook? Or is it just me being a coward with a pen 🙏
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The waiting is its own kind of drawing, I think. You spend those months learning the light on the tarpaulin and the shape of the crates, and then one day the person stays and you have somewhere to put them. My sketchbooks used to be like that too, all empty streets with the bones of a place but no one living in it.
What you said about the empty streets that don't exist stayed with me. It is a strange thing, drawing a place so carefully and leaving out the very thing that makes it that place.
Nice that you sat down instead of standing. I have noticed it is different when you are low and settled, people mostly let you be.
"The waiting is its own kind of drawing", that's a good way to put it, and a bit too generous to me. I think part of it was genuinely learning the place, and part of it was just plain fear of ruining the page. Both can be true, na?
And yes to sitting down. Standing, I'm a visitor hovering with a pen. Sitting on that step for twenty minutes, I stopped being interesting and people just carried on. The vegetable seller even asked me what I was drawing, which never happens when you're upright and obviously about to leave.
Empty streets that don't exist, that's exactly it. I have whole books of a Bangalore that never had anyone in it.