✏️ Urban Sketching
Depicting life in the city
📖 The Quote
'See the world one sketch at a time.' - Urban Sketchers motto
✏️ The Sketch
The only one step: Grab your sketchbook (or your iPad), go out and sketch!
Either go somewhere familiar around your neighbourhood, somewhere you’d like to visit in your town, or take on a more adventurous trip. Easy-peasy and yet so difficult: facing the blank page with the vast world in front of you is not a simple task. For some of us doesn’t come that effortlessly. But take it with philosophy, as Urban Sketchers say, one sketch at a time.
💡 Some Tips
Urban sketching is a great drawing practice and an enjoyable outdoor activity. It was nice to slow down for a morning, join a group of sketch lovers to walk around a specific place in London, and take time to draw.
I really enjoyed urban sketching, and whilst I am trying to do it more often, these are some insights I gathered from this experience and a few recommendations for anyone interested in doing more of it:
1 | Plan ahead but improvise during the moment
Have a think about what you’d like to draw and how (places, theme, technique, medium, colours, style…) before the urban sketching session. Paradoxically, planning ahead will free you up mental space to improvise during the moment. Don’t be afraid, on the other hand, of feeling each unique moment and going with the sketch flow. There’s something meditative in just drawing what surrounds you in a documentative way.
2 | See the world from multiple perspectives and at different speeds
Either look and draw with a single, precise perspective or adopt Hockney’s ‘eyeballing’ approach: he works with multiple perspectives in the same picture following his theory that this is the way we see and experience reality.
Also, practice sketching at different speeds: you could either sit down and concentrate on a slow drawing, which can be very relaxing and mindful. Or test your abilities with quick expressive and energetic sketches of a changing scene.
3 | Practice drawing at different scales and on different themes
Pay attention to the whole picture but also focus on specific details. Some people pick up different themes to practice their sketching skills, for example: drawing people moving, focusing on urban details such as furniture, drawing little scenes that tell the story of the place, or drawing patterns and shadows.
I loved that one of the sketchers drew the wildflowers in detail as a close-up and the architecture - the Barbican tower - at the back. The effect of the two scales gave the sketch an amazing depth (something a photograph won’t be able to capture).
4 | Get playful!
Explore a combination of colours and palettes, focus on the lines and add a touch of highlights, or mix different media, even words, in the drawing.
For example, I drew with a mechanical pencil (0.9 2B) and used green to add emphasis to the landscape. Because I only wanted to use green as a colour, I wrote ‘blue’ on the sky, as a way to still communicate that information in the drawing.
5 | And do it with more people :)
One of my favourite moments was when at the end of the session we all gathered together and look at each other’s sketches and learned from them. It is fascinating, and a privilege, to see the richness of the Barbican as an urban place from that many different creative eyes.
🖼 Great Urban Sketchers
Anna Shapiro was one of my tutors at the Architectural Association when I studied Housing and Urbanism, and a great inspiration for my own creative practice. She is immensely prolific in drawing and painting. Her quick sketches of London are full of colour, so bold and expressive. She has an amazing creative energy.
I met Si Newell during my sketch crawl at the Barbican and I immediately fell in love with his pen line sketches. They are so beautiful. I also love the ones in which he transitions from pen to watercolour in the same view.
Gabriel Campanario is the founder of Urban Sketchers and writes weekly On the Spot where he shares what great artists are working on. His sketches are just incredible, and he is so prolific as well. He uses black ink and blue colour.
He is so generous with not only sharing his work and process but also championing the work of others on the platforms he’s involved. I am so grateful to him for being one of the first subscribers and for recommending The Sketch Club. (Mil gracias, Gabriel!)
💫✏️
Happy sketching!
Ana
Have you done urban sketching recently? It would be great to hear about it! Please, leave a comment and share your thoughts down below :)
I'm so glad to have found the urban sketchers in my city! For me, going out to meet up with the group is fun, motivating, and involves accountability in a way that sitting home alone is not!