With the focus on portraits this month here’s what five members of the group, Susan, Brenda, Steve, Jane and Tracy, did during Adebanji Alade’s sketch week in March.

Local artist Adebanji lives in Gravesend and is President of the Royal Society of Oil Painters, the resident artist on BBC 1’s The One Show and a published author with his Addictive Sketcher books. He has an online art group sketching and painting and twice a year runs a sketch week open to the public for only £10 for 5 lessons. They’re at 7.30pm onwards but if you can’t watch a lesson live you have until the following Friday to watch and take part.

Once you sign up you’re sent a list of materials but if you have a sketchbook, pencils from 2B to 8B and a rubber, you don’t need any extras. At 7.30pm the session started online with a run through of materials and a chat about that day’s picture. Everyone is emailed the reference photos which have been taken by Adebanji or are free on the Unsplash website. You can print the pictures out or save them to your phone or tablet to use.

Adebanji showed how to grid the reference picture and then reduce the photo to external and internal angles, internal shapes, light lines, dark lines, light tones, middle tones, dark tones, erasing areas then reinstating darks. Whilst the sketches start loose the image suddenly appears and in an hour you are done. You’re encouraged not to fiddle with the sketch but to leave it as it is otherwise you try have a perfect sketch, but they not meant to be perfect. After sketching he encourages questions online from the public and spends another 30 minutes to an hour answering them.

You could join a Facebook page if you wanted to see what other artists created. In the week we drew two portraits, a figure, a landscape and an animal.

We all enjoyed the evenings sketching live or catching up and thought it was fantastic value at only a tenner learning from such an experienced tutor. Adebanji’s enthusiasm is infectious and you really want to do your best. It felt exhausting sketching and learning at the same time but you could pause the live programme then play it again. We all liked learning how to sketch like this and using blending stumps and hatching and will use everything we learned in our own sketches in the future. Follow Adebanji’s advice and don’t sketch for more than one hour, stop after 60 minutes and they will forever be a sketch and not a perfect drawing.

Here are Susan’s sketches that she drew live.

Brenda sketched the old man twice, once live and once on catch up. She also sketched a lily using the same techniques.

Steve did a couple of the sessions live then caught up by replaying the sessions on YouTube the following week.

Jane unfortunately had a problem with intermittent internet connection all week but sketched when she could see the sessions.

Tracy used an iPad for the reference pictures and after finding it difficult to swap between pencils quickly she used nail varnish to put dots on the pencils to see 2B to 8B much easier.

Well done everyone you did so well! Thank you for sharing your sketches to see what we learned during the week.

Adebanji’s next sketch week should be towards the end of the year, so hopefully more members will take the plunge and join in.