Trying out new toys and techniques

Lots of goodies in our goodies bag from the sponsors of the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Porto. I'm not good at trying out new things - I'm just worried I will want to go and buy more! So I'm trying to set the new pens and sketchbooks aside and start using them when I'm finished ones I've already started using.

Instead, I'm trying to focus on practising techniques I've discovered while in Porto. Mostly about gesture drawing. So I dug out an old book I have of nude poses, and I tried them out.

I filled a brush pen with ink and water and I set to work. Many more thousands of hours of practise before I reach a satisfactory level. But you know me, I get lost in the doing, never mind the result!

Here I moved to a lovely watersoluble marker from our goodies bag, the Marabu Aqua pen Graphix. Everybody got weird colours. But I like what it does. It's on my Amazon wishlist already! I want all the colours!

At this stage, I was a bit fed up working from a book, so my husband, absorbed in a book or his phone, more likely the latter, was a willing model.  The first attempt was done by just looking, not thinking. For the second one, I used the technique I learned at the NCAD for portraits. I'm quite pleased I actually remembered to use something I learned recently!