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: brush pen
Street photography and sketching
Five years ago I enjoyed ‘street photography’, trying to catch telling moments in Bath’s weekend busyness. After a while the hobby lost its appeal, it wasn’t quite as satisfying as it had been, and it was around then that I started drawing. Five years … Continue reading
Posted in Bath, brush pen, ink brush, Inktense, people watching, street scene, urban, urban sketching
Tagged ink brush sketching, sketching in Bath, sketching people in cities, sketching with Inktense pencils, street photography, street photography and sketching, street sketching, Teardrop Explodes, urban sketching
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Busts
Sketches from last weekend’s USkBristol/South West sketchcrawl in Bath. Fourteen of us started inside the Abbey (it was too wet to go up the tower) where I sketched a memorial bust and inscription. We then moved to the Guildhall market where I drew a … Continue reading
Posted in Bath, brush pen, cafe, figures, ink brush, Inktense, people watching, sculpture, sketchcrawl, urban, urban sketching
Tagged Bath Abbey sketches, Bath sketchcrawl, ink brush sketching, Inktense pencil sketching, Jimi Hendrix, sketch of man sat on stool, sketch of memorial bust, sketching in Bath market, Urban Sketchers Bristol/South West, urban sketching
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Down and up the path
First a four panel sequential sketch, done in brush-pen while walking down The Shrubbery, a steep local path, last month. Then the same view as the last panel a couple of years ago, and finally the view looking back up The … Continue reading
Improving a brush-pen
My favourite media for urban sketching is brush-pen (Inktense pencils a close second), and my favourite brush-pen is the Kuretake #8. It’s the cheapest (direct from Japan here), has great ink-flow (the Pentel is very dry), the brush is springy (firmer than … Continue reading
Compare and contrast
Recent sketchbook pages of people (and horses) around Bath, drawn with either ink-brush/brush-pen or Inktense pencils; spot the difference! I’m tending to oscillate between these two media, still loving the speed and fluency of the brush for figures, but also the slightly … Continue reading
Posted in Bath, brush pen, clothing, figures, ink brush, Inktense, kit, people watching, street scene, urban, urban sketching
Tagged brush-pen sketching, ink brush sketching, sketch of horse drawn carriage, sketching in Bath, sketching with Inktense pencils, The Small Faces, urban sketching, urban sketching materials
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Funchal museum
Back to Madeira with some sketches from the Frederico de Freitas museum in Funchal. A small ivory carving (with a lamb on the shoulder and one on the knee, St Agnes?), figures on tiles, and a C19th engraving of Madeira printed in … Continue reading
Selfies, again
The usual parade of glum and suspicious late night portraits… Sherry says the third one is how I’ll look when I’m seventy! In the second one my mouth is my third hand, holding the extra brush-pen I’m using. By the next one I’d … Continue reading
Around Funchal
More from Madeira, three general views around the capital. The first is from a rocky beach (they’re all rocky on Madeira…) near the harbour, buildings crowding the crumbling cliff. Then looking down a central street towards the surrounding hills, cloud … Continue reading
Posted in beach, brush pen, buildings, clouds, coloured paper, holiday, ink brush, Madeira, street scene, urban, urban sketching, white pen
Tagged brush-pen sketching, Lexington grey sketches, sketches of cloudy hills, sketches of Funchal, sketching in Madeira, The Orb, urban sketching, white gel pen sketching
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Sheltering and walking
Madeira is famous for its ‘levadas’, over 2,000km of hand-built irrigation channels with narrow paths alongside that snake along the contours of the hills, bringing water from the rainy Northern hilltops to the fertile Southern slopes. Our first attempt to walk them … Continue reading
Posted in Birds, brush pen, fire, holiday, ink brush, Madeira, travel, walking
Tagged levada sketches, levada walking, Ribeiro Frio, sketches of cockerel, sketches of fireplace, sketching in Madeira, The Quik
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Park tree
I went to the Botanical Garden to sketch the magnolias again, but it was shut (“Gates will be locked one hour before sunset”). So I sketched a tree across the road instead. Brown ink in a Kuretake #8 for the line … Continue reading