Concert Time Quick Sketches

Sketching people-at-work is one of my favorite things to do. Luckily I have kids who need to practice music pretty regularly for school 🙂

When I literally sit at my model’s feet and sketch, proportions are hard, and my sketches get longer and longer as I draw from head to toe…

These next few sketches are from a school concert. Sitting in a hall, crowded between strangers, not wanting to make a lot of noise or to have a big book open in my lap and spilling into theirs, I chose to draw with super-simple tools and on little sheets of tinted paper.

In this first sketch, I’m thinking and seeing in just big silhouettes. A bit of white marker at the end helps add some details.

And in this piece I’m going the other way, literally taking a line for a walk. The solid darks come later.

More sketches from the evening. Portraits of the really generous educators and professionals who come and play with our middle schoolers every year.

And of our amazing orchestra teacher, who I’ve captured a good likeness of sometimes. This was not one of those times, but gestures are always fun to draw.

For anyone that doesn’t draw people because they wonder what they’ll say and think when they see your sketches, here what I’ve learnt: when you sketch someone and it doesn’t look at all like them, (or worse, totally messes up how they look) and they see it, I bet they think: “he/she can’t draw so well.” and not “oh, I look so bad.” And I’m quite okay with someone thinking I’m a no-good artist, it’s never stopped me from drawing. Except once, for a long time, about 30 years ago But that’s a story for another time.