Quick Sketching Exercise

I'm used to sitting in the privacy of my home and taking my sweet time when sketching or painting.  It's my goal to gain enough courage to go out and sketch on location..........in public.  With that I want to feel I can capture a scene.......maybe capture moving objects like wildlife or people and to do that one needs to move a little more quickly to get on paper.  Or at least I would think so.  For me I'd rather not be at any one location for any real length of time for fear of people coming up on me to see what I'm doing.  Yes I'm a coward nervous around folks and especially watching me sketch or paint.  I'm not even comfortable with my family watching if that tells you anything :-))

Anyways.......I've tried some quick sketching exercises off and on but with no real goal in mind except to see what I could do without laboring over a subject.  To basically loosen up a bit.  Now with a goal in mind, I want to do some serious practice.

I found I had a book on Fast Sketching Techniques that has a chapter suggesting flamingos as a great exercise because of the simple shapes involved.  So here is a page I did of the same bird in three different poses.  Taken from photos of our trip in 2009 to Busch Gardens Safari in Florida.

Using a basically non-erasable pencil (to remove temptation) - Derwent Graphitone 8B - I quickly sketched each bird and suggestion of rocks.  Only took a few minutes for each.


Wanting to maintain that quick spontaneous feel, I used a 1/2" flat and just simply laid down a little color using W&N watercolors.

To re-emphasize the shapes, I went over with pen and ink.

Stillman & Birn Epsilon journal
Platinum Carbon pen with Black Ink
W&N Fr Ultra plus Raw Sienna and Opera with Raw Sienna mixed in it for the salmon/pink color.
1/2" flat