Portraits Europe 2024

September 21, 2024

While traveling through Europe in the fall of 2024, I wanted to mix up my sketching subjects and not draw structures and landscape entirely. At the time I was in Salzburg, full of tourists as well as locals coming into the old town dressed up for the coming brewfest weekend. Lively and interesting.
Since almost everyone on the streets had their phone out taking photos of the surroundings or themselves, I was able to easily get photos of subjects simply by looking away while taking shots in any direction of anyone I chose. No one noticed. This was subversive but exciting, knowing I was collecting good source material for quick portraits.

I decided to do small studies of many faces, so it made sense to divide the page into a grid, 4-up. The people were lightly drawn in with pencil and finally finished with my ink pens.

The final renderings seemed like they were rather harsh with no tones at all, just stark black and white. I looked through my studio drawers and selected a few things to scan and add to the images to give them relief, and to add a level of curiosity to them.
The first image features a scan of writing from my journal. The next one uses an oval template. The third page has a percentage wheel in it. The last page of images has a french curve defining the background.

This last image is a playful sketch of someone I studied on the transit in Munich. I believe it lead to the idea of drawing people, which hadn't occurred to me yet.