Sun, coffee and gouache in Jaffa

Sunny spring afternoon, we're having coffee at one of the corners of Jaffa. I'm pulling out my gouache set and starting to arrange the colors on the palette. "And what about the paints?"- the waitress is asking me while she brings ours coffee. "What about them?" - I'm asking her. "They wouldn't dirt the table?" "No, please don't worry! They are water based!"
Recently I'm in love with gouache and acrylic. I want to back to painting, the real one, as I did in the art school, but I don't have proper time for it. So I'm trying to bring it to my Urban Sketching. It requires more arrangements than just watercolor and pencils. And my bag is getting heavy. But I don't give up, and it pays back - I enjoy it a lot.

In my first sketch I'm trying to capture the whole scene - the street, the coffee drinkers and especially the sun coming from theirs back and giving all the characters kind of  aureole.
The couple on the left were speaking Italian, on the right - Russian. I felt abroad.

The group that came after were German tourists.

This girl with high hairdo arrived suddenly, drunk her coffee along, and continued on her way. I barely had time to capture her.

 And at the end - how not? My friends Nathan and Shai, smoking and chatting.

Home gouaches

I love gouache, but it's difficult to manage it and all the equipment when I sketch outside.

At home it's easier, and I have always have plenty of models.

#oneweek100people2017- day one

I took the opportunity to join the #oneweek100people2017 challenge. People is my favorite subject, I think I barely have sketches that isn't include people, so why not to do the thing that I love the most in a big and nice company of sketchers all over the world?
Here is some moments of my day.
At the morning I met my son Shai and we had a breakfast together in honor of his birthday and it was nice that first of the 100 portraits is Shai's portrait :)

Later I was needed to pass in the supermarket, where I found a lot of great "models".

It was fun, here is my today score -26 people!

Waiting for tomorrow :)

Coffee and friends at Basma

People in coffee shops

Coffee shops aren't the most breathtaking places for sketching, but people are everywhere, and people in coffee shops are perfect models - busy by chatting and eating, telling to a sketcher-hunter a lot of stories.

two not very young women

grandpa and his grandson

girls chatting

hipster looking like Herzel

At "Beta and Grega"

Beta and Grega - is the name of the coffee shop at the corner of Alenbi and Levontin streets in Tel Aviv. This area of the south of the city is full of contrasts - beautiful renovated Bauhaus buildings and crumbling walls full of graffiti, trendy coffee shops full of celebs and beggars passing through.
As you can understand - perfect place for sketching and finding stories.

it was Nathan's last day with his new beard ;)

Cowboy in Tel Aviv

Sima - woman that lives at the street, everybody knows her, asked us to draw her

Backgammon "club" at the flea market

Jaffa Flea market is one of the most colorful places in Tel Aviv, full of authentic characters, patterns, smells, sounds and stories.
After I came back from Singapore, where I was fascinated by the chess players "club" in the middle of the Chinatown, I was looking for opportunity to sketch street games players here in Israel. This week I found them at the Jaffa . Small table and two chairs in the middle of the street, two players surrounded by the group of men - was really the best show in the city! I think that Olympic Games competitors need to learn the worrier's spirit from these backgammon players!

Suddenly we saw at the opposite site of the street group of men organizing something... What are they up to? They turned to Jerusalem direction and started to pray:

Of course, there is no sketching day without food - we couldn't resist to have some humus!

Small cup of black coffee and Nathan, very concentrated by sketching people around :)

 It was perfect sketching day!

Singapore USk Symposium - part 2

I'm continuing my first post about the amazing experience of Singapore USk Symposium. Teaching our workshop "Face the City!" together with my friend from Denmark Ea Ejersbo was, of course, the main reason for coming there. Ea spent the last winter in Israel, near me, and then born our idea of leading a workshop together again. As our mutual favorite sketching subject is people, the starting point was easy to choose. We even did a rehearsal of our workshop in Jaffa for the local Urban Sketchers group. But, of course, doing it in Singapore, for the international audience, as part of the USk symposium, was a different experience!
Certainly, it's impossible to learn sketching people in three and a half hours, and even in there and a half days. Nothing can't exchange her majesty practice, but still, it's possible to transfer our approach to sketching people, and even maybe to the urban sketching in general. I don't fancy perfect step-by-step recipes of a perfect sketch. For me the way is not less important than the result. Lets's say, the way is what really matters, the final sketch is a nice by-product result. In our workshop the main emphasis was on trying to look better, observing, searching for the stories to tell. First of - what you want to tell, and only after - how. To make it easier, we broke our workshop into three exercises. In first one, called "Capture Emotions", we asked the participants to look around for people with recognizable facial expressions and try to capture them.

In second one, "Capture Action" - to pay attention to the body language, which can tell us a lot without words.

In the final exercise we asked to put our "heroes" in their surrounding and tell us a story, using our ability to capture emotions and feeling through facial expressions and body language.

The results were really wonderful, but most important, we saw the participants overcoming invisible barrier, making step out of their safe zone and really enjoying the process!

I enjoyed it very much! Here are some sketches done on the workshop's spot, checking it before and while doing the demonstration.

I'm grateful for the opportunity of being a part of so great team of Symposium's instructors, also because teaching is the best way to learn!
Here is the link where you can download our workshops' flyer.