At last, again, sketching at my local cafe on a Wednesday. It’s been a long time.

Sitting at the next table.

Relaxed.
At last, again, sketching at my local cafe on a Wednesday. It’s been a long time.
Sitting at the next table.
Relaxed.
I had quite some trouble sketching this morning as everyone I started to sketch got up and left. The foreground figure is a composite of several people. Thankfully the guy in the background hung around for two cups of coffee.
It only took one look to decide what the subject of this week’s drawing would be. Strong light was delineating the rather dashing hat being worn by a man at a nearby table.
Magic pencils and white pencil on toned tan Strathmore paper
The light also cast a dramatic diagonal across his face.
Same name but different location. Our local cafe has contracts for coffee shops at the university. Today, as we were in the area, we decided to try one of these venues.
It was a completely different atmosphere and demographic from our nearby place, which is a ‘hole in the wall’ with a few outdoor tables. This other version was crammed full of students, with obligatory laptops, in the still under construction, College of Business and Economics. It is a lively scene that I plan to go back to again.
The renovation work is continuing at our local shops, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone from dropping by for a coffee.
The last two weeks I’ve been drawing the machinery on site. Unfortunately no good figure sketching opportunities have arisen since my previous post on this subject. Two weeks ago I drew the bobcat, which was parked up at a pretty uninteresting angle to where we were sitting.
I’m not very excited by this drawing, I could have used the coloured pencils more effectively, rather than just ‘colouring in’.
Last week we found a better seat to observe what was going on. Thankfully the small digger that was being used to work on the replacement of the drainage system was parked at a good angle to our table.
This time I thought a lot more about how I was going to use my colour, which was probably helped by using the pen for the initial drawing. I kept my drawing loose, which is how I prefer to work. However there was one glaring mistake. I didn’t look carefully enough at the angle of the digger before I started. Had I done so I would have seen that the bucket was actually well below the level of the tractor treads. So now I have a more interesting composition instead, with the bucket tucked in the middle of the sketch.