Hawkers in Watercolors on Location- The Messy Middle.

Albert Center Market and Food center. “ Fragrant Blue pea nasi lemak’.

Sketching with my friend Wheeteck, took us to this hawker center because it’s too hot to do an outdoor session at noon. The sun was punishing this afternoon, and with the high humidity, if we were to sit outdoors, its like being boiled alive. The hawker centre was bustling but sparse with allowance to sit limited to two per table. Plastic is wrapped all over the other tables and chairs to avoid people from breaking the 2 together rules. 

Here, I want to write about the process of this kind of sketching on location. 

It took us a while to find the place to sit, that has a workable angle and distance from our subject. 

Angle of the hawker stall is important for me because if it’s too square a plane, there’s less of a sense of depth, so I always try to sit at an angle or if I can’t, to exaggerate the perspective slightly, so the second or side plane of the stall is more visible.

The next decision is decide what to do first? that oh so scary ‘How to start?’ I have two ways to start that I often rotate around depending on the mood and energy level. Either I start with colour first, a light but watery all over bleed of color, or I start with a pencil sketch, light and only basic sketching of the main structure. For this one, I decided the pencil sketch first, because I wasn’t sure what background colour to use.

I have the tendency to want to draw the details right away (something quite a lot of my students can relate to) and I have to resist, and content with getting to the messy middle as fast as possible. What i mean is when I start, i will expect to see a big mess, and the faster I get started the better likelihood that the details becomes less important. 

Why do we like to rely on drawing the details first? I always wonder about this. After years of teaching beginners, and basic drawing classes. The struggle is real with students always immediately drawing details, and then they get frustrated when they realise the proportion or structure is off.  I think we’re drawn to drawing details because it’s easier, because we see it. We don’t see the big picture, the broad structures, the underneath all of that details. So like baking a cake or building a house, in drawing urban scenes, we need the foundation, the base of the cake before we do the icing, or the structural details.

So how do we make this easier?

The Messy Middle

The messy middle, or what I also call the Ugly Stage, is a discomforting place where our page looks ugly, a mess, and you cannot visualise what it would look like when its finished, but you’ve gone and started it and there’s no way back. And sometimes it truly feels like you’re going to basically mess it up. This is the foundation, the cake base stage. Messy indeed! If you can relate to this. Let me tell you that the faster you can become comfortable with the messy start, the easier it is for you to start another sketch, and keep going. 

Being comfortable with the messy middle, means you’re not precious with the starting point. You give the scary scary white paper a kiss goodbye, and you run with what you have even if you don’t think you have that much. Fear of imperfection is why we hate the ugly stage. It’s the stage we’re most vulnerable to criticism, and we’re quick at criticising ourselves at this point. 

On this point, let me tell you about the second way I start a sketch. This is when I start with a splotch of colour first and not a pencil sketch, this is the faster way to beat the fear of white paper down and get some paint on, a light wash or a block of structure directly with paint.

So have a look at this sketch above. I like to outline, i am a strong outliner, but I refuse to be limited by my strength, so in this sketch I decide I am going to outline the girl down the bottom left of the page, and the table she’s sitting on. And then I’m going to break out my watercolour and start painting immediately. I painted the sign board without outlines, and just did a rough outline around the plates, and I don’t mind any of the distortions. When I paint the signboard already at the beginning stages of drawing, It gives my page a block of structured shape that make it easier to imagine in my minds eye how the stall structure will turn out. 

The next thing I painted was the red plastic bags hanging off the door sill of the stall. That stood out to me and I like to make that an undeniable punctuation. And then there’s the yellow plastic bags above it, and the royal blue one below it, all three a nice bold punctuations. Once those are painted, the stall’s body start to appear. 

And now the key to all hawker sketching Ive done is in the variety of grey I can produce. There are about 80% grey in hawker stalls because there are a lot of aluminium and metal used. So even with the busy-ness of the details, the stall is framed around a lot of grey. 

If I only mix one type of grey and use a spectrum of tea to milk consistency all over the sketch (to read about watercolour consistency, go here), there’s going to be a lot less dimensional interest in this sketch. It wouldn’t be a bad sketch, but it wouldn’t feel like my sketch. There’s a lot of value in knowing how to mix a variety of grey that is vibrant, lively and fresh. 

My grey mix uses the classic ultramarine and burnt umber, and then I added Violet, burnt sienna, or even sap green to get a variety of beautifully tinted greys. 

The final stage of this sketch is the addition of white pigment pen, to add on the neon and other fluorescent lights there. I also added a little outline here and there when i want to separate greys that dried slightly muddy. So much grey also means I have to paint the darker shape around the man behind the counter, and around the food stuff at the foreground. See how this adds so much depth.

It is important to leave ‘white spaces’ or just some white of the paper because grey can look muddy quickly if you don’t. 

At the end of an ugly stage, you’ll find going back to a little bit more outlining will help define and clean up messy edges. Having said that, it is also good to leave some of the messy edges alone, otherwise you might be in danger of overworking the drawing with too much outline.

With skin tone of the people, sometimes you can leave a lot of white in the skin, this communicates light hitting the skin in a harsher way, and can be quite a nice effect. In contrast, the skin on the man behind the counter, do not need any white, if anything it needed to be dulled down with a layer of shadow grey because he is after all behind the counter and therefor will be somewhat in the shadow. 

I hope this elaborated process helps someone understand how I work. I certainly learn a lot when I articulate the process of my sketch as soon as I’ve done the sketch. 

Until the next one. 

Susan