Kagurazaka sketch meet- up result

［by Kumi Matsukawa in Tokyo］

Olve from Norway, a frequent visitor to Japan, called for a sketch gathering in Tokyo, so we USK Japan members and some more visitors/ residents from overseas met and had great fun time in Kagurazaka, Tokyo.

We actually had sketch session in the same place early in this year, but that’s OK! I love this place. There are many unique slopes ( which are so challenging and fascinating to tackle with), many good restaurants ( wish I could try multiple lunch menu a day.)

Since the area is consisted of such narrow alleys, instead of staying all together in one place, as is always the case, we scatter around and each individuals found their own best location to sketch, then after going back to the meeting location, we lined up our resulting sketches on the ground and found variety of unique point of views as well as new techniques. That’s WOW time.

We had special impact especially by Vincent from France, who has just traveled in other parts of Japan and made many sketches, showed us his drawings. Wish I had chance to see his process capturing Japanese scenery using his trademark watercolor crayon! ( well, actually I once have observed his demo in Manchester as a Symposium correspondent to report the scene with my sketch at that time..) But still seeing his Cretacolor Lead use drawing is also awesome experience.

This time I myself made it rule to stick to use Faber-Castell Watercolor Markers, Pitt pens, and watercolor pencils ( that I got from the Jens Hübner’s workshop )the other day.

I sat very corner of narrow alley and I felt bad to be an obstacle to those drivers and I was nerves, and miss calculated the ratio of perspective… but as to how to apply color and lines, I kind of felt getting the hang of it.

Second one, I ambitiously held landscape format Moleskin sketchbook vertically, drew the looking up and looking down view in a vertical panorama. It was so tiring to draw even a single straight line in such position! I gave up capturing local colors, instead, I stick to depicting landscape using faint shadings ( I used spattering technic a lot.) and Pitt pen use line drawings.