Sketches from UTR

If doing something twice constitutes the beginning of a habit, then I have effectively formed the habit of doing little sketches of friends and acquaintances at reenactments.

I had enormous amounts of fun with this at Under the Redcoat, and even though I'm shockingly late posting about it, I wanted to share my drawings from the event.  Like last time, they are all fairly small (so as to fit in my drawing box) and are roughly 5x7" each. 

Nicole

Other-Sarah making ice cream

Sarah

I like this little sketch, but utterly failed to capture her likeness.  This was highly irritating.  See below.

Sarah (again) and Jenny

As you can see, for a brief while I switched from charcoal to graphite pencil... I was incredibly frustrated by my lack of ability to capture Sarah's likeness when initially using charcoal.  The second drawing was even worse (really bad in fact, and I can assure you it will never be posted anywhere online!) so I gave the graphite a try.  On this third go, this time in graphite, it wasn't totally awful so I let it be.

I feel like an invisible challenge has been laid down though.  Sarah is such an animated and vivacious person that capturing her in a flat, still format felt somehow a little unnatural and far more difficult than I had anticipated.  I will have to try again when I next see her.  And maybe again and again...

Abby

Right before I was about to leave for the day, I saw Abby walking across Market Square, rushed up to speak with her, and she kindly agreed to sit for me.   As we sat there (she very still and I sketching quickly) a lot of people apparently came up to see what was going on.   This included the official CW photographer who even videoed us.  I was blithely unaware of most of our audience however... I hadn't even realized how much I block out my surroundings when I'm drawing!  If there'd been an attack, I'd probably have died first.

Conclusion- I'll definitely be doing this drawing schtick again at my next reenactment.  I love being able to engage peoples' interest in a slightly different way than normal, and I'd really like to start building up an impression around the idea of a traveling portraitist.  Lots of very vague ideas at the moment, but it could certainly become something.