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: monochrome
Eye-lines
Mid-winter tired eyes sketched on four consecutive evenings before going to bed. I think they improved, with the last one being the best? I definitely became more familiar with the key shapes and lines, ‘zooming in’ on the subject, making accuracy and … Continue reading
Drink?
More wrestling with ellipses, reflections, distortions and translucency. Coloured paper and white water-colour’s a great combination for these late night studies. Lexington grey in Kuretake #8 ink-brush and water-brush, watercolour, A5 – a range of times, but fairly fast as it was … Continue reading
Tenby people
The last few Summer sketches from Tenby. This time people-watching around the town, moving from fountain-pen to ink-brush for the key lines. I was using a fairly ‘blunt’ brush then (a well-worn detailer water-brush) filled with dilute ink, so the pictures weren’t as crisp as the … Continue reading
Posted in beach, brush pen, comparisons, figures, holiday, ink brush, monochrome, people, people watching, technique, Tenby, urban, urban sketching, Wales
Tagged brush pen sketches, Can, ink brush sketching, moving from pen to brush, sketches of people on holiday, sketches of people waiting, sketches of seated people, Sketching in Tenby, sketching people by the sea, using ink in a water-brush
2 Comments
Baywatch, day and night
Two more Summer seaside views, when I was moving from pen to ink-brush for the key elements of a sketch. The first is from a ledge at the top of the North Cliffs, looking across the bay to Tenby old-town, with tree-tops below … Continue reading
Posted in boats, comparisons, ink brush, inks, landscape, Lexington grey, monochrome, sea, Tenby, Wales, waves
Tagged Belle and Sebastian, cliff-top sketches, coastal sketching, distant view of Tenby, ink-brush landscape sketch, sketch looking along the coast, sketches of Tenby, sketching at night, Tenby life-boat stations
4 Comments
Rising tide
From a visit to Aberporth a couple of years ago, trying out an inflatable canoe (it’s great!). I paddled around the headland to an inaccessible cove near the missile testing range, and sketched the beached canoe as the tide came in… … Continue reading
Lots of buskers
Lots of buskers, mostly in Bath, and some of their audiences (ranging from the totally disinterested to the partially engaged). There’s a few more sketches of barefoot Ben Powell, a bottle-neck slide cigar-box guitar player, and a couple who were accompanying … Continue reading
Posted in Bath, brush pen, buskers, comparisons, figures, ink brush, Lexington grey, monochrome, people, street scene, urban, urban sketching
Tagged Bobby Fuller Four, drawing street scenes, drawings of street musicians, ink brush sketching, sketching buskers, sketching in Bath, urban sketching, urban sketching technique
2 Comments
Oxford faces
I’ll follow Stuart’s advice and post something cheerier and less morbid (mostly). So here’s a range of faces seen on a day trip to Oxford, most from the wonderful Ashmolean Museum, which I’ve posted about before. They span the whole history of portraiture, … Continue reading
Posted in body, brush pen, faces, grisaille, ink brush, Lexington grey, monochrome, museum, Oxford, people watching, sculpture, urban, urban sketching
Tagged Ashmolean museum, Fayum mummy portrait, Max Greger, museum sketching, sketch of man asleep on train, sketching in Oxford, train sketching, urban sketching
3 Comments
More selfies
Another batch of late night selfies, including some deliberate attempts to avoid the usual self-portrait surly stare; I’m not sure that they’re any less alarming! All but one were done with my new favourite sketching tool, Kuretake brush-pens, either number 8 (plastic … Continue reading
Homework…
I rarely sketch from photos, but the wonderfully encyclopaedic People of the Twenty-First Century by Hans Eijkelboom is a treasure trove of reference images for the urban sketcher. It’s a beautiful catalogue of real people going about their lives, and copying the pictures … Continue reading
Posted in faces, figures, Lexington grey, line drawing, monochrome, people, sequential, technique, urban sketching
Tagged 'People of the Twenty First Century', Hans Eijkelboom, ink brush sketching, Malcolm Mclaren, practising urban sketching, sketching from photos, sketching people, sketching urban figures, urban sketching
3 Comments