You have just sat down in your dental clinic’s check-in area, when you look across the room and see a woman with very interesting eyes and very red hair. So, you do what you always do in such situations. You take out your pencil and pocket-size watercolor pad—and start sketching.
You have just finished your preliminary line sketch when she stands up to go into her appointment with the dentist. (And she does without any idea that you have been sketching her.) The man sitting next you says he is surprised that you could do this in about 45 seconds. But you explain that it took you so long because, after all, it is a Monday morning.
When you return to your car you take a picture of your line sketch. And that looks like this.
And now your miniature (just less than 4 inches high) masterpiece looks like this.
End of the story.
As you have surely realized, I did this impromptu vignette myself. And I could have given you a dry factual description of how I did it. I nevertheless wrote it as a narrative with you as the protagonist for a reason. I wanted to impart the sense of excitement and adventure that you feel when speed-sketching people.
You need no exceptional gift to speed-sketch.* All you need to begin with is the basic artistic skills taught by Betty Edwards in her book: Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain. Beyond that, you just need to learn a few special techniques that I acquired when I was a television courtroom artist. (You can see a sketch that I did for CBS News back in the 1980s at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtroom_sketch.) Those techniques are the subject of my third book, which has the working title: Speed-Sketching People. The most amazing part of speed sketching, by the way, is that as your velocity increases, so does your depictive accuracy—if you do it right.
The remainder of this article is excerpted from the current draft of that book, and it focuses on what I call my “expeditious palette.” This is what I consider the optimal selection of watercolors for sketching human beings. And this is what it looks like.
Yes! It is just three colors. More specifically, it is a simple triadic set consisting of Daniel Smith’s Mayan Red, Mayan Yellow, and Mayan Dark Blue. These are all sharp intensely saturated jewel-like pigments. Yet you can use them to paint subtle life-like human skin tones. This versatility enables you to sketch anything and everything you want.
My traveling kit for sketching is a small 6-pan Portable Painter Micro Watercolor Palette. This is what it looks like.
You can learn more about it at: https://www.amazon.com/Micro-Portable-Painter-Watercolor-Palette/dp/B08LG2YS64/ref=sr_1_3?crid=29A7AD8S3KXR6&keywords=6-pan+Portable+Painter+Micro+Watercolor+Palette&qid=1676937095&sprefix=6-pan+portable+painter+micro+watercolor+palette%2Caps%2C1122&sr=8-3.
That 6 count is the exact number that I need. And it is a convenient 2¼”x2¾”x1” when closed in your pocket or purse.
In three of the kit’s half-pans, I have squeezed nurdles of the Mayan primary triad, and then set them to dry. The three remaining half-pans contain flesh tones, which I have blended from the primary trio. I call these mixtures the Carotenoid, the Pale Melanoid and the Dark Melanoid ranges. (I base my flesh tones upon actual human skin colors, rather than upon the standard ethno-racial demographic terminology.) The following are generic faces that represent those ranges.
On an impulse, and for nothing more than the fun of it, I created this one more imaginary head.
I wanted to see how I could: 1) incorporate pure Mayan pigments into the flesh tones, and 2) get the appearance of white makeup on a face. This was just in case I ever want to sketch a clown or street mime—or anyone else of that kind.
Soon after I had originally devised this travel palette, I decided to take it out on a sketching safari—with a 9” x 12”-inch cold press pad. I usually work on pocket-sized (or slightly larger) pads or books, because that makes it easier to avoid detection by the people that I am surreptitiously drawing. But I wanted to do an illustration for my pending book, that shows what my watercolor sketches look like in a compact montage. (I should mention that this was prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, hence the absence of masks.)
I found these people in various settings. I saw the woman in the upper left corner (excerpted below), for example, at a wedding banquet.
She was sitting at a table next to mine and was conversing with someone to her left. I had a wonderful view of her elegant face. And she held this “pose” for a long time.
I saw these next two people on an airliner, when they were departing the plane.
Although I had been sitting in a forward seat, I was waiting for the crowded aisle clear, before trying to disembark myself. I sat high-up sideways in my seat and sketched these two faces in the stop-and-go throng of passengers coming down the lane.
The next face demonstrates something else you should know about my favored Mayan trio.
If you mix these primaries at just the right ratios, you get a solid black, which dilutes to a clean neutral gray. I used that black to paint this young man’s hair, and some of his facial features as well. Given that, these three Mayan pigments alone may well be the most versatile field sketching palette you could ever carry.
Observe that I did all these sketches so offhandedly that I made use of the spaces around and betwixt them to blot and assess my brush loads “on the fly.” This “work of art” will never grace the halls of the Louvre. I had delightful experiences in drawing these unsuspecting individuals. This is the ultimate form of “people-watching.”
On that note, I will end by wishing you a long happy lifetime of sketching!
*As with any other creative endeavor, some artists will do better at speed sketching than others. But the general ability to speed sketch is not limited only to the most exceptional.
