People never cease to fascinate me. Observing them has always been a hobby of mine. I remember, I'd sit on the college stairs with my friend, and just observe every person that goes by. We'd check out the way they talk, walk, dress and act. We'd do that for hours.
We were sometimes assigned certain projects at college. One of them would be to go sit at a local crowded cafe, and take a hundred sketches of different people. Of course a sketch should take no longer than a minute, because if you take longer than that to draw an unsuspecting person, your subject tends to change position before you have a chance to finish your sketch. The result would be a series of incomplete scribbles in the shapes of random human figures. But the good side of it is this: it teaches you to be more observant. It teaches you how to grasp the one thing that makes a person special. The sketches would be very brief, yes. But they would also be very striking. The personality of the subject would just jump out of the page at you. It could be the way they tied their scarf around their neck. Or the way the stood for less than a minute, you catching that moment so quickly on paper. It could be a sketch of a person bending over to tie their shoes, or that of a mother holding a little kid's hand while they wait to cross the street. Sometimes what makes a person special is the shape of their glasses. Sometimes its the enormously high pony tail swinging behind a girl's head.
If you're lucky however, you would manage to find a subject that rarely moved. It could be that of a person reading a book, or an old man that would just be sitting on a bus stop for hours, or a tired little girl who fell asleep in her chair at a restaurant. When you get lucky, your sketches are no longer just a moment caught on paper. You have more time to fill in more details. It turns into a painting. However, If you get that chance, you should always be prepared. An artist should always be ready, because these moments happen once in a lifetime.
I've been sitting at a coffee place for hours now. There were a lot of moments to catch, but I didn't have my sketchpad.
