Behind The Scenes/Process Vid: French Quarter Sketchbook, Sept 2023

I learned a lot!

For anyone on their art journey, or even if you’re not — I highly recommend this exercise. It was an adventure and a lot of fun and I learned so much in such a concentrated way. Also, people watching is always a treat. The long and short of it is to sit in a coffee shop and fill 15-20 sketchbook pages with people you see.

Immediately, what you get is a variety of angles, so even if the customers around you are pretty homogenous, god forbid, you can still get practice trying to capture the essence of a character from more tricky perspectives. It also trains you to be fast. You have to be; even seated, nobody really sits still long. So you end up taking kind of sketch notes that you can flesh out more later. Makes you think on your feet.

Speaking of feet: hands! Ugh! Hands are impossible enough to draw as it is, when they’re just sitting still or in a picture. But in motion? In perpetual motion? dude. I struggled. But it’s a beautiful struggle. And I kept telling myself I’d fix in post, basically, which as you’ll see from the video, I did (or did my best to lol).