I had a blast at the OIC Portrait Day held at the Red Dot Traffic museum yesterday. It’s a monthly event that lets drawing enthusiasts sit down and draw/paint for about 5 hours. Volunteers sit down for 15 minutes a session and get their portraits done by a group of artists. Each artist pays a small fee (e.g. $5) on the spot to participate and if the person whose portrait you just did likes it he/she can buy it from you for $8. The ‘clients’ are spoiled for choice really if the number of high quality portraits displayed yesterday was anything to go by.
There’s a lady artist who did great watercolour paintings (and did them incredibly fast!) as well as lots of pencil/pen/marker works which left me plenty envious and inspired. Since the turnout was pretty large we were split into two groups. In fact they quickly ran out of chairs and quite a few artists had to draw standing for awhile. There looked to be a decent mix of students, hobbyists and professionals; I’ll have to make it a point to mingle more next time. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the full session – managing to draw 6 portraits in the 2+ hrs I was there – but it was a lot of fun and time really flew by! I actually sold a portrait of a little boy which was very encouraging, seeing how this was my first time participating. Too bad I didn’t get a picture of the kid and drawing. Of course it’s not about money-making at all but about gaining more practice and (hopefully) improving my skills, checking out other artists’ works and drawing inspiration from them, as well as a chance to network. I’m already looking to be more bold in laying down pencil lines, as well as experiment with brush pens and markers in future works. And I’m so looking forward to the next Portrait Day in May.
I’ll upload the portraits I did once I get them scanned.
u went to MAAD?
Kinda. I was there to join the drawing event and not MAAD itself. I barely walked around but it looked like they had a cool thing going. There wasn’t very high people traffic though, likely due to the location.