Saturday, June 05, 2010

Cafe Sketch 5/31/10

Hey Bloggers!  I've been trying to catch up with posting my sketches from last weekend.  Here's the last batch I did about a week ago at the local cafe in my neighborhood in Berkeley.


As I mentioned several posts ago, I'm trying to make a more concerted effort of drawing the local scenery to stretch my artistic muscles.  The painting below is of a real estate office viewed from the cafe.  I'm happy with the overall picture but still feel like some parts of it get a bit too busy and need more improvement.
Any feedback would be much obliged!  Hope you all have a great weekend!

6 comments:

Unknown said...

nice, thanks for posting :)

Andy Latham said...

lovely painting Chris! Have you learned watercolours from anywhere, or have you just learned from experimenting?

chris chua said...

Nori-Thank YOU for checking out my blog:)

Andy-I'm pretty much self-taught in terms of watercolor. I did some watercolors in college for illustration class but not much more until I started to fill in my cafe sketches with them several years ago.

joscha said...

Hey chris, I have to say I feel weird giving a Pixarian advice (it should be the other way around;)) but please let me have a try...

I feel you're missing some focus in that real-estate office painting. My first thought would be to add some details with ink in the foreground. But i'm just crazy in love with line darwings and I can imagine you want to improve the painting.

So I guess you need to put the focus more on the building. You could try to make the tree in front of the building 'flatter', maybe just a filled in shape? (the detail in that tree leads the eye away from the office) If you'd keep the BG just a little paler -colour wise- I'm pretty sure the office would stand out more.

(If you'd want to put the focus on the tree the leaves would need more detail-like you already did on the tree trunk)

Hope this is in any way helpful!

chris chua said...

de app-I totally agree! Thanks so much for the advice. Guess I got too caught up with the details on the tree and failed to realize the building needed to be the center of attention. Cheers man!

Andy Latham said...

Thanks for the answer Chris. Watercolours are a beautiful medium. I think I'll have to make more effort to incorporate them into my own sketches :)