I always struggled with learning perspectives.

I am learning to allow myself to stay anxious and freely follow what I wanted to draw first, and second, and so on... What I learned was, you start with a single object that is at the heart of the perspective. For example, I started with the oblique line in the second picture below, the wires from what the bulbs are hanging. The persepective slowly started to ememrge around it. Like that round brick-made window-like structure on the wall on your left, the overhanging leaves, the little fence in the middle, the other hanging leaves on the right... And then I could see that already the background is set, where I could lay down the skeleton of the tables that stay in harmony with what the perspective demands. Maybe the perspective in my picture came out a little different and distorted from what I was seeing, but that added to the creative freedom. I could add Mathew and Ludo in the empty space of the left side, to capture the conversational energy of the table, that strictly following the perspective would not allow.

Then there was a second problem. Scenes are in general so full of details that always made me too overwhelmed to start.

I always thought that I have to choose very consciously what to keep and what to remove. But doesn't this simplification make it less faithful to the original scene that inspired me to draw it, at the very first place?

Again in this case, the way out is to embrace the overwhelmingness (is that a word even, hihi).

Justin encouraged me to not be afraid to add dark shades. And what this dark shades to me became was, a proxy of all the details I wanted to capture and could not capture. LIke, in the first pictures, all bustling of the flee markets ont he other side fo the canal, full of people and activities.

I want to borrow what my dance teacher Marta says: You forget about they are another person, another object. Your eyes stay half-closed, and you let your body respond to the energetic invitation those things bring to you at that very moment.