playinprogress's soup

Sketching at a party is even harder than sketching a wedding, the better the party the harder it gets: people who are not bored just move too much! Also, parties tend to be dark, so even if I see enough worth sketching, I can barely see my lines. All in all that means that most of what I get down on paper are gestures void of any particular features like faces or details of dress, or anything else that would make it possible to identify whoever it was that I was trying to draw. A typical page of party sketching thus looks like this:

But as an introvert who sucks at this whole ‘talking to people’ thing one night gives me a lot of time to try, so I did get some faces in there eventually.

Now, that was a private party. Things get even rougher at clubs, which tend to be professionally unlit, aka very dark. I anticipated this and took my boldest blackest pen, but still, for a lot of these lines I can barely remember what they were supposed to depict, much less actually recognize it.

The next day at home I tried to clarify them a bit with hatching to show which lines belong together to form a figure etc, as far as I could reconstruct it.


Also important: cigarette smoke.

Some details:

Now with an iPhone these light problems would be much easier to conquer, but for now I’m on the lookout for one of those ballpoint pen cum LED thingies. It is nice to draw in company, as well as to have something to do with myself at social gatherings. I can be there without having to wonder what the hell I am doing. I’m drawing. And this way, sometimes I can even catch my friends almost falling asleep at five in the morning…