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: body
Analogue selfies
Um, here goes… thirty self-portraits done over the last few years, usually late evening when I can’t find anything else to sketch to keep up the daily habit… I’m really quite a cheery soul, but the combination of staring into a mirror, and … Continue reading
mostly Greek
More sketches of classical statuary, mostly from the ongoing ‘Defining Beauty‘ exhibition at the British Museum, which is so full of wonderful stuff that I ended up doing very fast drawings with a marker pen, out of sight of the … Continue reading
Posted in body, coloured paper, exhibitions, figures, London, monochrome, museum, objects, pencil, sculpture, statues
Tagged 'Defining Beauty', Belvedere Apollo, British Museum sketches, drawings of Discobolus, Greek sculpture, marker pen sketches, sketch of Sphinx, sketches of Greek statues, sketches of Socrates, The Coral
4 Comments
Ink brush sketching
Here’s another collection of people in town, this time a monochrome set, done with a water-brush filled with dilute ink for speed. They were sketched one afternoon while sat outside a cafe in early Spring, hence the scarves and big coats. The last of the … Continue reading
Posted in Bath, body, brush pen, clothing, Feet, figures, inks, Lexington grey, monochrome, people, people watching, street scene, urban, urban sketching, waterbrush
Tagged brush pen urban sketching, drawing walking feet, sketches from a cafe, sketches of people passing by, sketching in Bath, sketching people on the move, The Monochrome Set, urban sketching people, water-brush filled with ink
2 Comments
Hands, again
My hands, family member’s hands, stranger’s hands on trains, and hands on porcelain figures. Complicated miniature landscapes of curves, shadows, contours and foreshortenings that make regular appearances in my sketchbooks. As individual and expressive as a face, and always a challenge. No … Continue reading
Waiting in town
A bus queue lined up alongside Bath Abbey, and more tourists sat on benches (previously, and here). Drawing directly with ink means ‘mistakes’ are visible, recording the process of feeling out where the lines need to go. Usually I just restate the line, … Continue reading
Posted in Bath, body, buildings, figures, from life, inks, Lexington grey, line drawing, monochrome, people, street scene, technique, urban, waiting
Tagged Bath Abbey, Bath tourists, bus queue, couple on bench, Fail better, fountain pen drawings, mistakes in drawings, people on benches, restating lines, sketches of people in town, The Byrds, urban sketching
2 Comments
Happy New Year
Welcome to 2015! This blog started two years ago and now gets about 50 visitors a day, so many thanks for your ongoing interest in my hobby. After sketching every day for almost four years I’ve settled to a particular set of resources, mostly fountain … Continue reading
In Memoriam…
Tombs, memorials and statues are another great source of patient models for sketching, so here are seven monochrome examples spanning three thousand years to finish 2014. ‘Memento Mori’ or ‘Memento Vivere’ depending on your mood in the run up to the … Continue reading
Posted in body, collections, coloured ink, coloured paper, death, inks, line drawing, monochrome, monument, sculpture, skeleton, urban
Tagged Bath Abbey, Bronze age skull, dog at feet of knight, drawing of skull, Edwin Starr, Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, memorials, Prince Albert, Robert Recorde, sketching in churches, sketching statues, St Mary's Tenby, statue of dog, tombs, urban sketching
1 Comment
My left hands…
…eleven of them this time, in a range of media. It’s a very reliable model, always there when I’m stuck for something to draw at the end of a long (Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young and Jones!) day, increasingly familiar, but with a fairly … Continue reading
Posted in body, collections, coloured ink, coloured paper, every day matters, from life, hands, inks, line drawing, monochrome, self-portrait, sketching
Tagged Crosby Stills Nash and Young, drawing own hand, fountain pen sketching, left hand, my left hand, noodlers inks, sketching hands, sketching with coloured inks, Tom Jones
3 Comments
Ow, my head hurts
Two bisected heads; first a pickled crocodile at the Grant Museum in London (tiny and old but very lovely), and then an anatomical model human at the Tokyo Museum of Emerging Science (large and modern, where I saw all the … Continue reading
Posted in animal, body, coloured ink, death, exhibitions, from life, inks, Japan, line drawing, monochrome, museum, skulls
Tagged anatomical sketches, bisected heads, crocodile head, fountain pen sketches, Grant Museum, Rage Against the Machine, section of crocodile head, section of human head, sketching in museums, sketching with coloured inks, Tokyo Museum of Emerging Science
3 Comments
I, Robert
Some robot/robert sketches from Japan, mostly at the Tokyo Museum of Emerging Science. First some animatronic manikin heads that nod and change expression empathetically when you speak into a microphone. They’re looking down on Asimo, the museum’s star attraction, named after Isaac Asimov, … Continue reading
Posted in body, coloured paper, from life, hands, inks, Japan, Lexington grey, line drawing, pencil, people, robots, Uncategorized, urban
Tagged Asimo, Dr John, Isaac Asimov, large model Transformer, manikin heads, robot hand, robots, sketches from Japan, sketching robots, Tokyo Museum of Emerging Science, Transformer robot
1 Comment