Stuartdraws

I spent a few weeks in 2024 creating drawings of characters I had envisioned or allowed to emerge naturally during the process.

The results surprised me—I was genuinely impressed with what I could create. But after completing a handful, I stopped.

Why?

Did I feel overwhelmed by the effort? Perhaps I pushed too hard, too soon—trying to add backgrounds or turn them into fully realized paintings before I was ready.

Maybe that pressure drained the joy out of it and left me hesitant to continue.

Looking back, I see now that it’s okay to pause when things feel heavy.

But here’s the thing: those creations were good. They reminded me of what I’m capable of when I let myself explore without judgment.

So, if you’re reading this in 2025, don’t let fear or self-doubt hold you back. Pick up that pencil or brush again. Start small if you need to—just sketch one character or doodle without a plan. The magic is in the process, not perfection.

Let’s step back into this together.

Obviously, it is much simpler for me to achieve pleasing results when drawing from reference photos. Nevertheless, my goal is to draw like this when I go outside to sketch street scenes in Bonn and other towns. I am working on capturing those fleeting decision-making processes that I can just about discern in my head when drawing. These decisions involve gesture, rhythm, shape language, and colour.

In the coming days, I’ll be practicing finding a spot in town where I can attempt to quiet the rush of emotions, thoughts, and doubts I experience when sketching in public. I will also practice coaxing the thoughts, feelings, and ideas I have when drawing at home.

The first step will be to decide on the scope of the scene. How much of the environment do I want to capture in the sketch? Then I’ll determine how many of the available figures I’d like to include in the scene. I believe I should start with one figure per scene and then gradually build up to two or three figures in other sketches. I will need to take my time observing and recording the clothes and gestures of the figures that interest me. I shouldn’t rush this part. Perhaps making a few notes or small sketches on the side could be beneficial, such as noting the colours of clothing, interesting accessories, facial expressions, hand gestures, types of shoes, and many other details. All the while, I will focus on keeping my cool and not worrying about what people may think of my results.

Once those initial steps have been performed successfully and without rushing, I will decide how much space the figure(s) will occupy in the sketch. Then the sketching can begin. I’ll go straight to ink for the figure, using a limited number of lines and always focusing on body language, facial expression, hand gestures, and proportions. Colour mixing will come next. The figures will need saturated colours and should receive only one layer of colour for each shape (I mustn’t go back over a colour). I also need to resist the urge to capture the light with soft and hard edges; there may be some happy accidents, but I’ll have to wait for them to appear in the finished sketch. One more thing with the colours: I should try not to let them bleed into each other.

When I am out sketching with the Urban Sketchers, I don’t really fret about my results. Once I arrive home and start looking at my sketches with an overly critical eye, the fun of the sketching event starts to dissolve into frustration.

It seems like I can’t achieve the goals or level of polish I expect from myself once I’m back at home.

I often find myself distracted by details when on site. Even though I approached these two drawings with the strategy of starting big and loose, I ended up focusing on details everywhere and couldn’t reduce things to a single focus with nice depth.

At home, I used coloured pencils to try to create some three-dimensionality and a perceivable difference between the foreground and background. However, it feels like I’m struggling too hard to achieve a believable level of realism, and this struggle is starting to drain me.

Perhaps I should let go of the idea of depth and focus for a while, and see what I can create.

Short, quick poses need clever approaches. One I’m currently honing is to limit the line number and reduce the level of detail. I’ve been studying the drawings of Sempé and have moved my focus to identifying, replicating, and pushing “shape.”

Perspective and proportion maintain a leading role in my toolkit. If the rhythm looks okay, it may be coincidence, or because I drew 70 thousand gesture drawings between 2014 and 2022.

I’m going sketching in town tonight, hoping to put this skill set into action while drawing passersby.

The year 2022 is coming to an end. The last few months I’ve found myself drawing and even painting a little more again. I registered for two evening classes at my local adult education facility (Volkshochschule). I went to watercolour classes Monday evenings. Thursday evenings I sat together with all types of budding artists, and while they were introduced to a different media every other week, I’d draw black and white figures from reference photos.

This year, I eventually managed to unblock my mental constraint for just drawing something without references in my sketchbook. I’m still not good at it, but … once a week I’ll fill a page or four in my book with silly figures.

Urban sketching is plodding along, I get out every Wednesday and draw and chat with others. I’m not always happy about the venues, but I generally manage to get up and go to them. This year, I also started moving into a more colourful approach to urban sketching, starting with 3 felt tip pens, then introducing more colours and eventually even moving out with a whole mat of coloured pencils. I’m now reducing that multitude of colours back a little, because there’s so much I don’t understand about colours and it confuses and frustrates me.

Charcoal is also back on the menu. I’m making A2-sized drawings of figures on newsprint, learning about gesture, shape, proportion and next up is form. The goal is eventually to draw better imaginary figures in my sketchbooks. Which I believe was the reason for me starting to draw.

The past 9 months have taught me once more, how important it is to be working with tools that make you happy. The paper needs to be what you love (in my case that’s smooth, thick and it needs to lie flat), the pen needs to be fit for the purpose, react to your every whim and behave consistently and predictably (I have quite a few of them. Unfortunately, fountain pens have not fulfilled the requirements, so it’s back to Tombows and Faber Castell pens. Which I’m ok with.). I spent a lot of time just playing around, doing quick, daily, pose sketches. But that got boring and wasn’t really worth sharing with anyone, so going back to urban sketching and a few portraits was quite joyful. Here are a selection of some of my latest and greatest.