Aloma Bowl

Posted on by Thor

Towards the end of my six week Urban Sketching course at Crealde School of Art I like to bring my students to Aloma Bowl (2530 Aloma Ave, Winter Park, FL 32792) only 2 blocks from the campus. On Sundays Bowling leagues are competing and most of the lanes fill with talented bowlers who are serious about their game. My hope of course is that my students will feel just as serious about their sketch game. There are bars made out of the bowling ball holders at the end of the lanes and those high top bars make a great perch for the sketchers to work from.

I dash off a sketch as a demo to show students how I time the various stages of my sketch to finish in the several hours allotted. These bowling sketches are not as finished as my usual work since I also visit each artist multiple times giving advise and tips. The end of the bowling lanes where the pis are lined up offers a perfect horizon line which is something I talk extensively about when discussing perspective and composition.

Students are also encouraged to just do a sheet of studies of peoples gestures so that they loosen up and are not worried about the final composition at fist. Prior to the trip to the bowling alley we did a series of quick gesture drawings in the classroom. By goal is to loosen up the students enough so that they have something on the page from head to toe in the first 30 seconds and use the remaining time to add the “Icing” or detail that makes each sketch unique to the person being sketched.

The most challenging pose if of course the final “release” post as the bowler sends the ball down the lane. Everyone had their own stance as they release the ball and the pose is gone in an instant. The great thing is that they get up every few minutes and repeat the movement making it possible to attack the drawing multiple times and considering each angle and curve individually. This takes patience and perseverance and the realization and acceptance that no drawing is perfect.

Aloma Bowl

Posted on by Thor

My intrepid group of urban sketching students from Crealdé School of Art went for a sketch outing to Aloma Bowl (2530 Aloma Ave, Winter Park, FL 32792) which is just a block away from the school. On Sundays Tournaments are held, so there are some pretty talented bowlers working the lanes.

The goal of this sketch workshop was to help students catch gestures in their sketches. For the first half hour of class we worked in the Crealdé studio, doing quick, two minute sketches to catch gestures. We used a round shaped radio to substitute for a bowling ball and posed, keeping gesture and storytelling in mind. I stressed the importance of using fluid action lines to catch the motion.

The Aloma Bowl lanes were active when we arrived and they grew more crowded as we sketched. I made the rounds, showing the different stages of my sketch as I progressed, and also giving tips and some demonstrations on how to catch a pose in repeated attempts as the parson stepped up to the line to bowl again and again. The large overall sketch was intended to demonstrate one point perspective. I suggested that students only focus on the bowling pins on one lane so they didn’t spent much time obsessing over that one detail.

Families came in to bowl, and guard rails were raised on either side of the one bowling lane so that stray balls didn’t go down someone else’s lane. For the very small kids there was a ramp that could be put on the line and the child just had to get the ball to the top of the ramp and gravity would “bowl” the ball down the lane. I had never seen that contraption before. The first bowler I sketched was finished with his game after only a few times of going up to the line to bowl. I started getting better about watching the score board of people I was sketching, because the board could let me know if I had much time to sketch the people before their game was over. My quick demo sketch stressed the importance of making the figures in the foreground dark against the illuminated lanes. I didn’t spend much time on the sketch since I kept checking in with each student as they worked.

There is a wonderful energy to a bowling alley, as folks celebrate their strikes or spares and chat between games. The place had an auditory buzz about it, punctuated by the loud sounds of the pins getting smashed. As an artist, it is exciting to feed off that energy and try to infuse some of it into each sketch. This was unfortunately the last class with this crew of talented artists. It is always hard to say good by after working with artists for six weeks straight.

My next Urban Sketching: Tips and Techniques class starts June 16, 2019 running each Sunday Morning from 9:30am to 12:30pm. Usually, the first hour we cover a premise in the Crealdé studio and then we break out into the community around the school to sketch on location.

Aloma Bowl and the Frankenstein Effect

Posted on by Thor

On Sunday mornings I teach an Urban Sketching class at Crealde School of Art and the goal is to get the class out to sketch in the community each session. We take the first half of the class to discuss a premise and do an exercise and then we apply that lesson out in the field. I had prepared course materials for something I call the Frankenstein Effect. When drawing on location you seldom have more than 5 minuses to draw a person. On many occasions you might only have 30 seconds before the person walks away. The goal of this class was to get the students to get a very fast gesture on the page within that 30 seconds and then add details to the sketch by borrowing body parts from other people. The head might be from one person, the torso from another and the legs from yet a third. Details of fashion are also mixed an matched.

To get started each student posed for a brief moment and we would sketch just their legs to start. The next student would pose and we would sketch the torso and a third student would pose so we could sketch their head. The results were surprisingly consistent and as an outsider you could not tell that the figures had been “Frankensteined” together.

The Aloma Bowl (2530 Aloma Ave. Winter Park FL 32792) has bowling leagues each Sunday, so it offered a great place to sketch to sketch active poses as people bowled. One bowler was interested in buying one of my students sketches and I am trying to get them hooked up. The trouble is I’m not sure which student might have sketched him. I contacted two of them and will show him both their sketches too see if I can find the sketch he wants.