Day 3 at Urban Sketchers Symposium Singapore (24 July 2015)

Today’s day #3 at the Urban Sketchers Symposium, and tomorrow is the last day.

In the morning I went to Virginia Hein and Frank Ching‘s workshops. It’s very inspiring to see that Frank Ching is still ever as enthusiastic at drawing and teaching even at an old age, and making the trip to Singapore.

Frank Ching was teaching the class outside of the Singapore Art Museum. One useful technique he taught was to place your pen/pencil directly onto your paper surface, and move them together upwards to your eye level to measure the angle of your subject. That’s brilliant.

And other tip he mentioned is the importance of your first line. If the line is too long, then you may run out of space for drawing other subjects. And if it’s too short, then you may not be able to fill your drawing, and the composition would suffer.

Virginia Hein’s course is also interesting. One common thing I noticed among watercolour artists is their emphasis on the importance of thinking in terms of shape and values.

In the afternoon, I went to cover the Activity on street food sketching. It was conducted by Anita from Singapore. I don’t sketch food because I like my food hot. Turns out that many sketchers think the same way too, as I found out from Shari Blaukopf.

Rob Sketcherman was showing me his Helinox chair and after trying it I’ve to say that it’s the most comfortable portable sketching chair I’ve ever use. So comfortable that you may accidentally fall asleep on it after a tiring day of sketching. It’s that good.

Finally at the end of the day, I went to Jane Blundell and Paul Wang‘s classes.

Jane was talking about her ultimate mixing palette of 15 colours. I found out from her that she has customized a cigarette box into watercolour palette. Such is the dangers of checking out other people’s tools. When you see them, you want to buy them, or even make them yourself.

Paul was teaching the participants on how to create textures using different methods, such as using fingers, plastic wrap, paper towels and trying different granulating pigments.

Here’s the video (18 min) from day #3