Peacock pens

On December 1, 2023 I visited the classic car fair in Kortrijk (be). It is a bit of a tradition that, when there are oldtimer car fairs, I visit them with my dad. Now, because of the corona pandemic, it has been a while, hence the double enjoyment.

It was also around that period that I started to become interested in loose watercolor sketching. With this in mind, I looked at the fair in a different way. So I wanted to capture some nice scenes with the intention of making a sketch of them later. Now easier said than done, as always. The conditions were ideal for taking beautiful photos: few ‘disruptive’ visitors and the vintage cars were nicely ‘staged’. Just for your information: the vintage cars on display were all prewar vehicles, or at least this was the intention.

It was a pleasant stay at the fair and I returned home with a nice series of photos.
Back then I started with full enthusiasm to select a photo to sketch. Of the many photos I ended up taking, only a few are eligible for sketching. Now, my skill in sketching vehicles is certainly not my strong suit, which is why I also took this into account when selecting a photo. Below is the selected photo and sketch.

For this sketch I first did a black ink sketch. The black ink is water resistant. Then I applied the watercolors. The nice thing about this is that you can decide for yourself how detailed the sketch should be and you can also decide for yourself which elements you do not want to add to the sketch. In this way, the focus is more on the essentials.

What I want to bring you with this post is how much fun it is to eventually fill a sketchbook with the day’s activities. It is an added value compared to a traditional photo book, but it also creates a special memory. And filling a sketchbook in this way is an extra motivation, because often the search is ‘what am I going to sketch today?’.

So you will regularly find sketches of real-life events on my blog, the prewar classic car fair is an opener in this case.

Before I end this post, I would like to come back to sketching vehicles. I freely admit that this is not easy. It is certainly as difficult as sketching portraits and it is a skill that is still ‘under construction’. So on my ‘to do’ sketch list I add ‘practice sketching vehicles’.