Capturing Chaos: workshop review (and downloadable pdf)

It’s always an honor to teach at an Urban Sketchers Symposium. I taught my first workshop in Brazil last year and was thrilled to teach again this year. My workshop in Singapore was titled  Capturing Chaos: Drawing a Crowd. Here is a recap of the experience – and the downloadable pdf I promised to post.

What better place to draw a crowd of people than at the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple (Chinese temple) on Waterloo Street? This is one of the demo sketches I did at the workshop: the ornate temple in the background, colorful red and yellow umbrellas with flower and incense vendors and the crowds that pass through.

Part 1 of the workshop was sketching people using quick line-of-action sketches (more about this in my handout).

I love this first bit, because we invariably begin with many of the participants claiming they can’t draw people, but halfway through the workshop, they proceed to draw pages of very convincing figures.

In Part 2, we talk about putting it all together to create a single sketch of a crowd.

To capture the crowd, we worked in alternating steps of structured and unstructured sketching, embracing this contradiction. The opening statement on the handout outlines the approach we used through the rest of the workshop.

Here are some shots from the workshop. It was a hot, humid, and challenging 3.5 hours, but the participants were super enthusiastic and we ended up with some really interesting captures of life on Waterloo Street, Singapore.

These are shots of sketches-in-progress by workshop participants.

Here is a link to a downloadable version of my workshop handout, which includes a brief overview of the exercises we worked on and some random thoughts on drawing crowds. Click on the image below or use this dropbox link to download a pdf of the handout.

Thank you Shari Blaukopf, Rolf Schroeter, Veronica Lawlor and Barbara Weeks for letting me use your sketches in this handout.

If you download the pdf and use the material, leave me a comment, tell me what you thought… I’d love to know.