Rhythm in the City (Workshop B)

Rhythm in the city. by Inma Serrano. from Urban Sketchers on Vimeo.

Instructor: Inma Serrano (Sevilla)
Location: Plaça del Pi

The city develops around us as something alive and human, as something awake and constantly moving. If we want to speak about the moment we are living we have to show in our sketches what is inside it: The rhythm that moves the city.

We will base the workshop in three main areas:

• People are alive. The rhythm of people.
• Buildings are alive. The rhythm of the buildings.
• Color is alive. The rhythm of color.

PEOPLE ARE ALIVE

This first exercise will specially attempt to offer some keys to synthesize the human figure and reduce it to simple and organic gestures and forms.

We can use similar abstract shapes to draw quickly similar elements like heads, clothes or bags that at the end conform a person…

The rhythm of people.

The object of this exercise will be to find out which is our personal way to draw quickly these forms that allow us to work easily with our memory once people change positions.

Also we will look for those quickly ways to draw things far away, those simple and abstract shapes that make our brains associate them with figurative forms.

BUILDINGS ARE ALIVE

In the next step, we will look for these same organic forms in a seemingly lifeless object as architecture is.

In applying these forms to architecture, you generate a distortion and a movement that gives it dynamism and life.

The rhythm of the buildings.

COLOR IS ALIVE

Color can be applied in a smooth or violent way, orderly or disorderly, concrete or abstract, real or unreal to compose with it the character we want our sketch to have.

An only spot of color that moves through our paper can be the body of one person. With one quickly stroke we can generate a movement. We can give life.

Finally we will do a color quickly exercise to check how the color can also be the main leitmotif in our sketch. The rhythm of color.

Learning goals

• To find the personal quick drawing gesture that synthesizes complex and elaborate human forms into simpler and straightforward forms.
• To play with architecture and buildings losing respect for the straight and rational forms, looking for the gesture and the irrational movement.
• To find a partner in color and its application, to compose and manage the pace of our sketch.

Supply list

Easy-to-use tools and the desire to have fun sketching.

Sample sketches