I’m an Urban Sketcher…
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Blogroll
- Antonia Santolaya/Enrique Flores A chance to browse through 26 travel sketchbooks. Lots of fresh watercolour, ink and pencil location pictures.
- Buttnekkiddoodles Don Colley’s blog, sharing fabulous brush-pen drawings of people and much else. He’s a big fan of Pitt Artist brush pens.
- Danny Gregory His book ‘The Creative License’ got me sketching, and his other books have helped to keep me going. He has a wonderfully loose style, using dip-pens, saturated colour inks etc.
- Handprint Exceptionally comprehensive information on watercolour paints and equipment. Exhaustive details on pigments, translucency, comparing brands etc. Essential viewing for the true obsessive.
- James Gurney A mine of information on ‘plein air’ painting and sketching from the author of ‘Dinotopia’. Daily posts, always interesting.
- Nina Johansson Stockholm based urban sketching, with lovely clarity and glowing colours. Lots of useful information on sketching kit that helped to get me started.
- Russel Stutler Lots of very useful information on brush pens, palettes, sketching techniques. Based in Japan.
- Steven Reddy Great use of pen drawing and grey ink washes, sometimes combined with clear colour on top.
- The Sketching Forum Informal sharing of ideas, techniques, pictures and general chat about sketching. Set up by Russ Stutler.
- Urban Sketchers A constant parade of individual responses to the challenge of urban sketching. Always good for some inspiration, a new approach to try…
Category Archives: blind drawing
Wonky, skew-whiff, bockety, odd
Last week I accidentally wandered into cubism through blind-drawn continuous-line selfies… I recommend having a go, they only take a minute and the results are so strange that you can’t make any ‘mistakes’. Hold a pencil ready to draw on … Continue reading
Improving a bamboo dip pen
My current favourite mark-maker is a bamboo dip pen. I love the free-flowing lines that can wander around the page, and it’s great for ‘blind drawing’ of foliage, clouds etc. It delivers big juicy lines that can merge into forms if you … Continue reading
Sketchy selfies
The latest crop of selfies, including some in coloured ink and bamboo dip pen, along with blind drawing mirror fun (that’s the fourth one!). There’s the usual range of self-portrait expressions from sullen to severe via surly, and a higher frequency … Continue reading
Cloudy, with a chance of sketching
A collection of cloud studies (more here). The third one is the same cloud drawn three times as sunset arrived (I ‘overcooked’ this sketch and should have stopped much sooner. They’ve ended up looking like Aegean islands…). And the last two are … Continue reading
Posted in blind drawing, colour, sky
Tagged blind drawing, contour drawing, Inktense pencils, Midlake, sketches of clouds
7 Comments
Cloudy
The same cloud sketched four times, continually changing as sunset approached (‘cloud’ is sometimes more verb than noun). The light pencil lines were mostly drawn blind, with watercolour wash added straight after the final drawing, the colours still fading from the sky. The … Continue reading
Pencil landscapes
As a break from ink-brush propaganda here are some pencil landscapes from the Summer. The first is on a lane in Lancashire during a light rain shower, the second and third on the Galloway coast (clouds over the distant Isle … Continue reading
Posted in blind drawing, clouds, Galloway, landscape, line drawing, pencil, sea, technique
Tagged Blind Boys of Alabama, blind drawing foliage, gum arabic as fixative, pencil landscape sketches, sketch of birds on a wire, sketch of sky at dusk, sketches of Galloway coast, sketching in pencil
6 Comments
In praise of pencils
I’ve tried to like pencils, really I have. I love their woody simplicity, but never found one that felt right on the paper (too waxy, too smudgy etc). But a couple of weeks ago I tried a Grafwood 6B. It’s consistently … Continue reading
Posted in Bath, blind drawing, buildings, cars, figures, hands, kit, line drawing, pencil, people, street scene, technique, urban, urban sketching
Tagged drawing of hand, pencil sketches of people, pencil street-scenes, sketches of Bath, urban sketching, urban sketching kit, water-colour rose
7 Comments