I met my urban sketching group at the Kirkwood train station. I left home dressed in a sleeveless shirt and shorts in case it got up into the 90's again, but instead we all got rained on.
Frustrating for me as I'd started painting the train station itself and then had to switch to the feed store across the street when I moved to get out of the rain. The feed store was an interesting brick building with a checkerboard pattern and the store name painted on the building with old white milk paint. But the only way to "paint" white with watercolor is to leave the paper blank, which is why my drawing looks so splotchy. It would have been much easier with a bigger sketchbook.
I've been trying out some different techniques this summer, mostly when it's too hot or rainy to go outside (which seems to be most days this month). The first technique is portrait sketching using my new fountain pen (with the water-soluble ink) and watercolor. I think the portraits look very interesting... they just don't look like the pictures I drew them from.
The second technique is pen and ink sketches where you use cross-hatching pen strokes to make the shadows. They look good, but they are very labor-intensive to get the really dark shadows, plus they use up a ton of ink. I think wetting the ink with water and letting that make the shadows is a lot easier.
