Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Jim Richards. I'm a travel artist, an urban sketcher, a writer, and an international workshop instructor. This is bringing city seems to life, sketching cars, trees, and furnishings. Now, when I go to a city to sketch often as not, I've already got a star of the sketch in mind. Maybe it's a great piece of architecture, or a really interesting street scene. But when I look more closely, there's always a fascinating supporting cast as well. Things like the funky trolley car, or a beautiful line of street trees, or things like antique street lamps and signs that can tell you something about the place that you're in. Now, you're thinking that learning to incorporate all those into an effective sketch could take years to master, and it can. But I'm going to teach you a shorthand that can take years off that learning curve. We're going to start by learning the right tools in that situation. Then we're going to jump right in to sketching cars, trucks, and buses. We're going to move over to street trees and learn to draw them and beautiful bare branch, in full leaf and even flowering forms, then will jump over to furnishings and we'll treat that both as a detailed study, and then incorporate furnishings into a lively perspective. When we finish, we're going to take all those elements and put them together into a beautiful one point perspective with a lot of depth and character. Now, this class is great for you if you're an absolute beginner, or if you're a seasoned professional, or if you're a fine artist that just wants to brush up on your sketching skills. It's great for professionals like architects, landscape architects, urban designers, even background artists in the film industry will find something to take away from this class. Now I'm going to be drawing right along with you, we're going to be doing your projects as you go. I'm going to tell you a little bit more of that in the next video. In the meantime, I'm really glad that you're here, I'm excited about getting started, let's go.
2. Your Class Project: Now the project part of the class will evolve real naturally because you're going to be drawing right along with me. We're going to start with cars and we'll do a sheet of those basically. We'll do the same thing with trees and then we'll do the same with furnishings. For the final piece of the project, we're going to put all those together into a one-point perspective sketch that again, I'm going to be walking you through, through both the line drawing and the color. It's relatively easy steps. We're going to start with a human figure that we can use for measurement. We're going to have a single line, basically that outlines the street face, sidewalks, street. We're going to find a vanishing point and an eye level, and then project a one-point perspective from there. Then flesh it out with trees, vehicles, details, darks. So that we come up with something with a lot of richness and character, add some watercolor to it. We're going to have a great time with it. I look forward to seeing your projects. Let's talk about tools you'll use.
3. Tools You'll Use: Hi, welcome back. We're going to take a relatively simple approach to this. We're just going to use a few pens, some brushes, and watercolors. Let me introduce you to those things now. Most of this is going to be done with these little Faber Castell Pitt artist pens. This is a fine and I'm also using a 1.5 on this project. I'm using those because they glide real easily over smooth paper. This fine has really nice thin line, the 1.5 has a much thicker line. Between the two of them, I can do all sorts of things. The main thing about them is that they have waterproof ink so that I can lay down a drawing quickly and come back and put watercolor wash over it and we are good to go. I might occasionally use this Duke fountain pen that I used for almost everything in the sketch in five easy steps video. You'll recall that I can go from a very thin line to a very thick line, and by turning that bent nib, I can really get some interesting linear effects. If you look closely at that nib, you can see that it is like a calligraphy nib and some wonderful little tool. In terms of brushes, I'm only using two. I've got my Escoda travel brush here. Number 12, more importantly, is a sable brush, so it works like a mop and that'll come in handy when I'm doing the wet and wet sky. For the smaller details and whatnot, I've got a synthetic brush here that has a really nice point on it. It'll allow me to get in and do some things without using a rigor brush. This is actually part of a set by Vlad Yeliseyev, who was one of my watercolor teachers. These are wonderful synthetic brushes if you need something like that. Finally, I've got a couple of gel pens here. I use this little Uni.ball Signo, it's UM-153, you might be able to see it there, to come in and put highlights on things, and almost never use this gold pen gel pen. But there's one little detail on this that I want to use, and sometimes if I'm drawing in England, I can be doing pub signs or something like that, and use the script from this gold gel pen, and it's really, really nice. I think there's one little piece where I'm going to use a couple of these Tombow gray paint markers that are a really nice little. I've got a very, very light one, and one that's not quite so light. That's all the pens and brushes I think that we're going to be using. I'm going to have my trusty watercolor palette here, and same palette that I've used for two or three years now. I've got Naples yellow, which I probably used more than anything else, Alizarin crimson and Prussian blue. Those three are Winsor Newton colors. The rest of them are Daniel Smith colors. Cobalt Teal Blue, Ultramarine, Viridian Spring Green, Azo yellow, which I almost never use, and I think I'm going to get rid of that and replace it with something that I will use. Cad yellow, deep Mayan orange, deep Sap green, cobalt blue. I use a lot of that, especially in conjunction with this cobalt teal blue, neutral ten, burnt umber, burnt sienna light, and carbazole violet. Real intense purple. That's fun for some details. That's what we'll be using watercolor wise. You would need a water container. You'll need a little sprite sheet for freshening up your paint, and you will be good to go, folks. Don't go and spend a lot of money. Just get the things that you're going to need. Make sure when you get pens that that's waterproof ink, and well, take off and get started. Now that we've got to get a handle on the tools we're going to use. Let's grab a pencil and a sheet of that watercolor paper, and we'll get started on sketching colors.
4. Cars: All right, let's get started with drawing some cars. Remember, we're not drawing them as the star of the sketch, it's not a sketch about cars. They're supporting cars, they're in the background of things, but they're adding some realism and authenticity to the scene. They need to be believable. Let's get started. Let's just get into sketching some cars. I've got here the types of things we're going to be looking at. I usually start cars either facing directly toward me or facing away. We'll look at some cars in a three-quarter view. Because as we're standing on the side of the street and traffic's going by, you are usually looking at the front or back of a three-quarter view. We'll look at buses and trucks and those types of things. Let's jump in. Do as I do. I'm going to come in here with just a line that'll represent a pavement, if you will. We start so many other things, I'm going to come in with a human figure, like so. As we learned how to use this as a measuring tool in the first class, I'm going to say that that eye level is five feet. No big trick. We're going to draw just for context and for scale, a tree next to this guy. We're going to spend lots of time drawing trees, so don't worry about that for this particular exercise, but there it is. Now based on what we know about how tall this guy is, how tall is the tree? Twenty feet. Thank you, Perry. Perfect. Perry Richards, ladies and gentlemen, give her a hand. We're going to start off drawing some cars just flat on the ground looking directly toward us. How about that? The way that I like to do that is to come into this five feet and break it up into thirds roughly so that from the ground up we'll have X, in the middle we'll have X, and at the top we'll have X, and each of those is about equidistant. Let's go in and draw just a rectangle like so. You can see that I'm not being real careful or anything. See these crossed areas and whatnot? All that contributes to the informality and the looseness and the freshness of a sketch like this. Those are all really good things. I'm going to put another line down there for a bumper. Couple of headlights. Here's how we can put in some personality depending on the types of accessories, headlights, and those types of things. We add this whether or not it has a grill, whether or not it's got a little logo on it, those types of things. I usually don't go to that much detail this early on in the process, but you can if you want to. Then I typically do the top third next. If this is the middle third, let's jump up here and draw a couple of struts and then pull a roof across horizontally. Notice that these struts that hold up the roof aren't pure vertical. They're at an angle of anywhere from, depending on the type of car, say 60 to 45 degrees or something like that. Let's make sure that those come back pointing inward. Unless you're drawing a Hummer or a Jeep Wrangler or something like that, in which case they really are all but vertical. Now let's do the bottom third, and what that consists of is tires. Always an undercarriage, like so. That's really important, to make sure that your car looks heavy enough, like it's not floating. The other thing that is important to that, we're on a flat surface here, but I always in a perspective view, always have a shadow under these things, and you should too. Put a little shadow right under that roof to give it a little bit of weight. If this car is parked on the side of the street, it looks fine just like it is. If this car is moving down the roadway coming right at you or directly away from you, you really need to have a driver in there. That's as simple as doing something like that, you don't have to spend a whole lot of time or trouble on it. We'll give him a pow, and those guys are headed off to the Waffle House or something. Let's do another one quickly. Let's do the middle third again and put a bumper on it. Let's say that this is a import from Japan may be, so it's got a little more fast back-type eyes on it. It's probably got a little bit lower roof and maybe a little bit rounder roof. We'll put our line across the top there, and we'll put our bottom third, the tires. Little skinny tires on that guy, differential, and a driver, there we go. You can see by just bending a couple of things, you can have all character in these. If I take this metal third and draw one big circle and another big circle and go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, what's that? It's a Jeep. That seven-point grill is actually trademarked by them and those stretch really are almost vertical, not quite, but almost. I've owned a couple of Jeeps in my time and I'm familiar with all these affectations that they have. It's up higher off the ground, I'm going to make fatter tires on it. The ones that I've had have always had a little fender on them like that. High undercarriage so that you can go over rocks and things, and a single rugged individual for a driver. There's some different ways to think about these things. All right, you've got the fundamentals down, let's stretch it now to work on some trucks, buses, that thing. Here we go.
5. Trucks and Buses: All right. Here's how I use that method and adapted for cars and trucks. Let's go. What's really fun about that particular way of going about it simplifying it step by step, is that you can also stretch it and bend it and do some other fun things. Let's see. I'm going to put some big square headlights on this. A big massive grill. I'm going to pull some stretch up like so. That looks a little better. Put in some tires on that bottom third. Now, for a little bulldog up there and I've got a serious truck. Whatever that is, a muffler pipe or something on there, a truck driver. Put the truck driver a hat. In all likelihood, he's pulling a trailer behind him. Now watch this. I know that my eye level line is about here where this guy is. If I bring it straight across and assume anywhere on here really a vanishing point, I can say I just put it right in here someplace and just eyeball it and pull that trailer back like that, extend this cab back just a little bit. Instead of having the wheels right behind each other, that's got two wheels in the back there. I'm going to do something more like this. All of a sudden that truck is in perspective. Pretty cool. One-point perspective, very simple, but still pretty interesting. It's got a nice logo on there because he's delivering food or something. That's how we turned these things into a one-point perspective coming up the street at us or going down the street away from us. One of the other. I'll show you another example of that real quickly. I hope I left myself enough room there. I think I did, where I can come in, do my middle third and make that bumper a little bit deeper. Do a wheel well, do another wheel well, bring that body back and end it back there at the back of that wheel well. This is where another little just knowing how these things are put together comes in handy. I've put some tires on there up into the wheel well and drawn them as big ovals rather than trying to draw them around. As you know that that won't work if we're drawing in perspective, there'll be ovals. I'm going to come over here, will be able to see this front wheel and tire here and back there as well. These struts are right over those wheels. I can put one right there, pull it up, come up over this one at a little less steep angle, pull the roof back, pull it back down on the back of the car and that one's a little high off the ground. That's probably a Subaru, something or another, and I've got him coming at an angle. Finally, in this case, because I want to know what the overall height is, I drew the middle and the top first, but I'm going to go back to my middle third and turn this guy into a bus. Usually got some logo on the front. I'll pull down some struts. This is up so high that I'm able to see a shadow up there. I'm getting messy with this but as I said, that that really doesn't bother me in the least. We've got tires underneath. Almost any bus will have this big black part of the dash sticking up and the driver sits right over that. The passengers are typically up a little higher than the driver. There they are. On their way to someplace fun. Now, if I do the same thing to this guy that I did to the truck, that is pull it back and turn it into a perspective, we would be able to see another tire back there. I forgot the undercarriage, so we're just going to add that real quickly. We'd have windows on the side, we'd have the roof as well, but we'd have the windows on the side. Those lines are going back to the vanishing point over here. Then we'd have these vertical pieces holding up the window there. Technically, you might be able to see some on the other side, but I'm not going to bother with that because we're just getting into too much detail. There's a little sign up there that may say where the bus is going. We've got a virtual used vehicle lot here, a new vehicle a lot. Sedans, SUVs, trucks, buses, all with that same basic. Do the middle first, then the top, then the bottom, and work your way through it. Pretty cool. All right. Let's put some color on these vehicles now. We're going to have some fun.
6. Adding Color: Vehicles: We've got a great approach to sketching cars, trucks, and buses. We've got some really nice little drawings done. Let's put some color on them. This is my 140 pound cold press watercolor paper. Because I'm going to put some water color on it and don't want the lines to run, I've used one of a number of pens with waterproof ink that I keep handy. This one's a Faber Castell Pitt Artists Pen that I told you about a little bit earlier. This was a F for fun, and it serves this purpose very well. I'm going to go in and just very quickly, I need for that to be a little more intense, more like this. Just drop some color around these guys. Some cars, the bumper is going to be colored as well. Now, I want to leave a little thin line of white right at the top of that hood for reflected light. That will come in handy when we actually render the things around the car, and you notice I've left a little white right at the top of that roof as well. We'll come back and add some shading to that. But in the meantime, let's put some yellow. That's a yellow. All right. Let's put some yellow on this guy and just a little bit there, but try to leave a little white at the top. Hopefully, you'll do better than I did. We'll come back and put some shade on this as well when it dries. My favorite Jeep was a wrangler, rag top, five speed, and we're going to pay homage to that. It was green. It had a flag license plate that made it look like General Patton was coming down the road or something. I left a little white at the top of the roof there. Typically, the fenders and the bumpers on those things are black, so I'll come back to that in just a minute. Here is our truck. Let's make it yellow as well. This is hard core truck or stuff, we don't need any fancy colored bumpers or anything like that, so we're not going to have any of that foolishness. But we will put in some shading on one side since this is in perspective. Looks like I missed my line there a little bit. Throw some color on those things as well. I'm going to pretend this is some logo or something here. Again, just give it some visual interest, a little red. I'm going to leave that guy just like he is and the bus. What do you think about the bus? Put some red on the bus like so. It's pretty nice. That looks like a modified bus. All right. I'm going to see if these are actually dry, this is great news folks. I'm going to come in now and just put in a little bit of shading along the bottom of these things. You don't have to do this, but I like to do it, and let those colors blend into each other there. What I'm using this color here is my trusty combination of Alizarin Crimson and Prussian blue that I use for so many things, shadows and shade and things like that. Let's go ahead and hit that tires, and undercarriage and shadow on the ground, like so, and put just a little bit across there like that. Same here. That's a little more blue than I like it, but for this demo, it will suffice. We'll just put a little bit of shade on the bottom of that guy. Because the sun's going to be hitting that roof, it's going to to be hitting the top here, all that's going to be a little bit lighter. Nice. Sorry, my head hit the phone. Very uncool, rookie mistake. We'll go ahead and darken all of this in a little bit. Add some dark there, add some dark here. Just a little at the bottom of the roof, and leave a white line at the top. Since we've got people in the windshield, we can't pretend that there's just light reflecting and leaving them lightish colored. I'm going to come in and just maybe hit them with a little ultramarine. That looks pretty good. You can also leave some reflected light on it like that. You can do this with gray. You can just leave it white if that suits you. I just put a little more of my purple and blue on that one, but the bus deserves better than that. We'll put a little bit of a reflection on there, pull it back this way. It looks like I missed some red right here. What do you think folks? Now, I'm just showing off. Nice [inaudible]. That is a mixture of my cobalt blue and the the teal. Both are Daniel Smith colors. There goes my splatters. You've learned some really versatile sketching techniques that can apply to all types of vehicles. Let's move onto trees and we'll start with line drawings.
7. Trees: Branching: All right. Let's talk about trees. As I explained with cars, trees aren't going to be the stars, the focus of the sketches. They're more life supporting cast in these particular instances. They're making more beautiful and enlivening these street scenes, making them look more like a place that people would want to be. We're going to look at drawing trees and branch, and with emerging vegetation on them. We're going to look at some flowering versions. We are going to look at trees and full leaf, and what that can bring to a sketch in terms of character. All of this is relatively simple. Hang in there with me, and we'll have a great time. Hi. Now that we've seen how I apply these trees, and city scenes, we're going to come in and actually draw these things just like I promised. These are some that I was playing around with yesterday. But we're going to start from scratch. Like we did with the cars, I'm going to take this Faber Castel Pitt Artist pen on account of I am an artist, and make a line with it. See, artist right there. We're going to try to draw some of these different types of trees that are suitable for use in an urban street type situation. What does that mean? Well, it means that people can walk underneath them, that they're usually trimmed up enough that trucks or cars can go underneath without knocking off branches and things like that. We're usually looking at deciduous trees, especially further north, because they'll provide shade in the summer, leaves will fall, and they've got these beautiful branching patterns during the winter and allows a little bit more sunlight to penetrate, and also nice views to the retail along the street. Those considerations. So we're going to pretty much stick with that type of thing. What I usually do in that situation is draw a very quick light canopy line, semicircular, but also notice that it's not a perfect geometric semicircle. You don't want to get a circle template or a bowl or something, and draw that, because it won't look right, it won't look natural. Nature doesn't work that way. So I've just drawn it as quickly as I could with my hand and I'm going to pull off a trunk like this and take the central leader, right up to that canopy, not going to worry about stopping exactly at it. If I crossover, that's just fine. Then I'm going to come down a ways, maybe about a third of the way up off the ground, and pull out what I call these primary branches. Like so. Now, look at that. That looks a lot like a hand, doesn't it? Or a claw or veins on a gingko leaf or a river delta where it's thicker, and then it gets progressively thinner as it gets further out, and that's a universal pattern, folks. It's instantly recognizable by any species on the planet as just looking right and natural. You want to be able to take this and then turn it into different size trees, that type of thing. Because this branching pattern with some variation, is pretty much universal. Now let's go in and somewhere right about in here, start pulling some secondary branches off, and taking them up toward that canopy. Now watch, you see how I overlap that right there? Big mistake? No. We want to do that, because again, nature, there's this tree, the branches are all growing together, and the more you overlap, like so, the more three-dimensional the thing looks, instead of looking just like a rubber stamp or something. Let's bring some more out like this. That's starting to look like a tree, yes, Jim. Let's go a little closer to this canopy line that I drew, and do it again, and pull out some little tertiary branches that are reaching toward the sun. Oh man, looking good, don't you think? Yes.Okay. There you go. There's a deciduous branching pattern. Nothing's set here, I can come in and do as many of these, or as few of them as I want to, but that looks pretty good for our purposes. What's interesting about this is, if I take this tree right here and draw some people having a seance underneath, let's see. We know that that eye level line is about five feet, so 5, 10, 15, 20, 20, that's a 30-foot, probably an American elm, based on the shape. I could do these branches in a little bit rounder configuration, it might be something different, but that's what this looks like. That's a 35-foot American elm. If the person I drew next to it was this size, well, then we got a whole different thing going on, don't we? Give him a hat since he's outside. Then we've got an ornamental tree that could be a little hawthorne or a very small crepe myrtle or something like that. The point I'm trying to make is that this universal branching pattern can be used for any of these. It can even be used for little ornamentals at this scale or a woody shrubs, I like that, woody shrubs. Don't it sound funny? I also like to come in and just make some leaf litter, you can call them little spots on these branches that don't have the leaves on them in the winter time. I had a workshop teacher one time call these things busy bees. It's universal in design drawing language. My drawing teacher was an old hippie, and he called them atmospheric dots, and I like that a lot better. So we're going to call those atmospheric dots. That's pretty cool. You can do all things with this if you wanted to, you can extend. Maybe there's more canopies growing out. Just make this a really interesting old gnarly tree. If you wanted to, it would have a little bit longer trunk on it like that. I like the looks of that. My hope that you do too. Let's see, why don't we just take one a little bit different shape if we will? But show you that this way of drawing these things remains basically the same. I'm going to put two trunks, maybe even three on this one, just to show you what a multi trunk ornamental tree might look like. See how fast I'm doing that? That's on purpose. I want this thing to look fresh and loose, untamed, if you will. I don't want it to look like it was very, very carefully done, very self-consciously. There's our atmospheric dots. I want it to have a look of freshness and looseness about it. There's a couple of different ways to draw branching trees. Well, what do you think of that branching pattern trick? It's something that's relatively easy to learn. Then it's just a matter of practice, and as I've shown in the lesson, it can apply to trees of just about any size and type with some variations. Let's go ahead and jump into trees with some leaves on.
8. Trees: Full Leaf: Whether you're drawing trees out on the street or in the studio, you'll not only need to understand how to draw a branching pattern, you need be able to draw trees in full leaf in another forms. Let's go ahead and I'll show you a nice way to handle that. Let's take a look at the same type thing, but in leaf. In summertime or spring when this thing is in its full leaf glory. What I do is pull up a trunk from the ground and then draw a lobe, if you will, kind of irregular. Look around next time you go outside and see if you don't see trees that look like this, that rather than one big round canopy, it grows out in lobes with different branches and what not. Let's draw it that way. Now that I know how I want this thing to look, I'm going to come in and put a little bit of texture on these leaves. Now a pure water colorist would just go on at this point and start adding color. But I don't know if I'm actually going to add color to this or not. I may leave it as a black and white sketch in my sketchbook if I'm not drawing it on the street or something. I'm going to go ahead and put a little texture on there, and you're scratching your head and you're saying Jim, "How do I know how much to put on here?" Again, like when do I stop? Well, for a canopy like this, let's assume a light source that the sun is up here, and this side of this canopy, remember a canopy, it's not just a two-dimensional looking thing, it's more like a ball that has a lit side and a shade side and a shadow underneath it. Let's beef up the texture on the shaded side, and draw almost nothing on the sunlit side, the same type of thing. Now, these lobes are under this one's, so they're not going to get as much of that light. They're going to be a little bit darker, and I'm going to put some texture on those, and we don't have to, but that's how I like to do it. Finally, this guy down here. Now look at that, see, I've got a deep shaded part of that canopy coming down. I'm going to do the same type of thing over here, because this is heavy. It's got light up at the top, but deep, deep darks down underneath. A lot of times, in a situation like this, especially with a pretty loose sketch like we're going to be doing, I want to emphasize that shade versus light, and so I'll come in with some line work, and darken it even more. I really like that handmade look of the line work. I'm not trying to recreate something photographically, that's pointless, you could take a photograph if that's what you're trying to do. But I want it to look three-dimensional. I'm going to spend as much time as I need to to make that happen. I'm going to pull this down, and what's fun about right now is that I can do this as long or as little as I want to. I can just keep adding branches, and it's always fun when those branches stick up in the holes and the canopy and I didn't leave any holes in this canopy, that's a mistake on my part. I should always leave some holes. Then when I come in and add some color to these, those holes will be sky pieces and that's very important to the overall thing. Look at this trunk, how I've got to shaded right under these canopies with just a real quick little stroke there, and the other branches I've added, let's see if the sun's coming from this way, this side is probably going to be shaded. These other trunks that I've added, I've shown how light is working with them as well. I'm not going to do anything else to that. I think that that looks pretty good. Just for the heck of it, I'm going to draw one more out here without all at texture on it. We'll just play with that and see how we like it, with just the watercolor on it. I bent the trunk there a little bit, give me some motion. A little bit more dynamic look to the thing. That's funny now. I neglected to say that if we've got vegetation underneath, now on a city sidewalk, we won't. But if they're in a park or something like that, we always show a shadow underneath the canopy. We show that shadow by drawing the turf or whatever is underneath it dark rather than just a black horizontal line or something like that. Not forget my atmospheric dots. You've learned some really versatile techniques for drawing trees with bare branches and drawing trees in full leaf, now will apply watercolor.
9. Adding Color: Trees: It's time to gather up your palette and brushes and I'm going to show you a couple of different techniques for adding water color to the trees you've just drawn. Is going to knock you out. You're going to like this. I've mixed up a little color. Let's take a look again at this light source coming down from over here. I indicated just by not drawing texture in here that this was going to be sunlight. These are darkened and they're going to be shady. Well, we can do the same thing with this if we want to indicate that there's some emerging foliage or something like that on these. My favorite time of the year to look at trees and to draw trees, is very early spring when you still see all the branching patterns, but the new leaves are just starting to come out and you've got this nice green field over those bear branches, but you can see through it, and you can see the branch and you see these beautiful branching patterns. That's what I really enjoy experiencing that time of year. Since we're sunlit from this side, I'm going to start with some yellowish washes. This is a little bit of my Naples yellow with some cad yellow deep. I will beef that up as I need to. I'll come in with just some pure cad yellow in there, maybe a little bit of red. Obviously, I'm going for fall here, and I'm just pushing those up. A little bit of green down here on the shades side, you don't obviously have to do this, the same way that I am. Trees are individuals and we're individuals, and you ought to be able to put your own stamp on it. But this isn't a bad way to start. Learn your chops, and then find ways over time to make it your own. It's fun. But I want to go in, I'm getting this deep Sap green now, right out of the pan and adding some more dark in here, and just pull that across and make these edges irregular. I'm going to make it a little palm green and just put it in there for fun. I have a little bit of interests on the outside of that thing there. Trunks on trees like this. It's real tempting to just reach for the brown, but they're really more grayish than they are anything else and so I use this neutral tent with some burnt umber and that works pretty good for what I want to do. There we go. Now, we can see all the branches coming through there and this is again, just a really nice pattern, but we've got some foliage on there as well. That's a kind of a fun way to think about that. This one we could do very similarly, or something wildly different. Let's say that maybe that this is some flowering tree. That's a nice thing. Perhaps we'll give it a little bit of green under there where you can see some foliage. But not too much. I mean, the nice thing, we paid extra money probably if we were the homeowner or the city park guy to get this beautiful tripled trunk specimen, and so we want those things to be able to show, we're not going to carry the color all the way down into that. That's plenty for that. I don't want to get much more detailed than that. Let's try it again. This time, I'm going to go backwards and start with the dark areas. Remember that these lobes are underneath this one that's getting most of that sunlight, so we'll show it that way. I want to show that sunlight like this. Again with just a little bit yellow. There's some cad yellow deep, too much. It's fun. I said I was going to leave that sky right there. There it is. Little bit of red. This is that Myan orange actually, blend with that yellow. Man, I'm liking how this is looking. Then we'll pull some more greens. This green that I'm putting on right now is a mixture of Prussian blue and that cad yellow deep. We're going to darken up this down here a lot more. That looks a bit right, don't it? I'm going to get a little bit of sap green right out of the pan and make this even darker. Wow! Some of you know that my urban design training was in landscape architecture school. I've been drawing trees for a really long time, but never with watercolor. This is a whole new adventure. Then is that font or what, I am just going to leave that, he says as he adds more cheap bright color to it. Let's just try it on this other one over here. We are going to get crazy with this thing. Bum bum bum. I can make this just all greens, but that wouldn't be as much fun for me. You can make yours all green if you want to. This is my cad yellow and Prussian blue mix. Again, and I'm going to put that down here. No yellow over here because the sun's coming from this way. There's not a place for it. There's no sun getting down there. I think I overdid it. I think I might have overdone it a little on that red on this one. Not to worry. Really dark down in here. This is that sap green right out of the pan. The trick on this are going to be making this look like it's three-dimensional. Like there's light on some areas and there's not light on other areas. Like this ought to be really dark, down under there, and this all ought to be pretty dark. Atmospheric dots. God love little things like that. I'm going to add a little color to these trunks. I think we're done. I can show either very few branches and lots of leaves or lots of branches and leaves just emerging. Both ways, you can do some very nice things. Let's stop before I ruin it. Going too far and ruining it is an ever-present danger, isn't it? Let's put the watercolors aside for a little bit, get those pens back out and we'll start sketching some furnishings.
10. Furnishings: Close Study: You've got to get a handle on cars and trees now. I want to spend some time talking about what I call furnishings, and that's things like street lamps, street signs, benches, bollards. The types of things that may vary a bit from city to city. In that way, they're a way to put a stamp on a place in your sketches, that ground you particularly in that city. We're going to be drawing these in couple of different ways. One as an up-close study of the artifact itself. Almost like a found object, this is something that exists in that cityscape that is important in terms of telling us something about it, how historical it is, the kind of materials, these types of things. Then showing them in context and that's really two different ways of thinking about it. The first being, having grown up in and around New Orleans, the French Quarter rather street lamps are unlike anything else in that city or any other city, for my money. What I've got here is this beautiful metal casing for the thing, with little detail up on top. This is glass, so you can see through obviously, and that's the bottom of that part of the light. We come down to something like this. Keeps going further down and through the glass we can see these two metal pieces holding up that other side of the casing. It comes down something like this. That's what it looks like. It's a beautiful thing. There's some other things going on though that make it even more unique. A lot of times there's these cross bars on it to which you can attach banners and that sort of thing. But these in particular come down something like this. They've got these metal rods, fragile looking actually that come down and attach to the pole. Those may be common in Paris or something like that, but I've never seen them quite like this in any other part of the United States. That's why I say that these furnishing sometimes can go along way to establishing a regional identity. Similarly, you've got very interesting dark black street signs, black borders that is for things like Bourbon Street. There's pretty distinctive lettering on the signs as well, but typically I won't go in and try to replicate that lettering literally. I'll just use my own writing like I've done here. If I'm looking at a Serif font on the sign, I might go ahead and add some Serifs, something like this. But I don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time creating a likeness. If I wanted to do that, again I'd take a photograph or I would do it very carefully or cut and paste from a photo or something like that. None of which holds much interest for me. These street signs are also unique because they've got a little French Fleur-de-lis on top of them. That comes down to something like that. I usually make notes on these types of drawings, so I'll remember what it is that I've drawn and why I thought that it was important. I'm going to guess 1800s, for this purposes, that's close enough. This is one type of drawing, is this really detailed study and just a little bit of information possibly. But the other kind is just drawing this stuff in context. You can see that I was pretty quick here. It's almost cartoonish, it's not a very detailed architectural study of this thing. Even less detailed, when I'm drawing this in context. What I'm going to do is draw just a really quick cityscape sketch and put in some furnishings because that's where these things are really interesting to me, is how they can animate a city scene. I have been playing around with the idea of a trolley car sketch. We'll draw the side of it here and cut a little shadow under it. You're not going to be able to see much in there. We'll darken these windows. They've usually got a little piece on top with the destination. This is a real trolley, this isn't one of those cheesy fake trolleys that runs on tires. This is electrified and it's moving through the city that way. Let's see, let's put it on some rails. Let's put those rails in the context of a street. So far, so good. What I've done is set up a perspective here. The street's going to continue on around that way. Let's start to drop in some of our furnishings. I'm going to come up with something like this and put in my first street lamp. I'm picking up on this detail here. I'm not going to use it exactly, but close enough. Pretty exactly. It's going to narrow down and you're going to be looking at these things very carefully. I'm doing this in a more generic fashion. But you're going to be looking at these on-location and really getting a feel for how they're put together. Understanding that before you start drawing. They've all got a widened base as well. If my line doesn't go exactly where I want to, I just draw it again. Some of these may have street signs right on them. Let's go ahead and do one. Like the Bourbon Street sign over there. Short word, let's call this Eve street. Shortest word I can think of right now. A little bit of character. There, I've seen worse. Maybe a regulatory sign here as well. I just drew right over this light pole and that's okay because when I put color on it, that light pole underneath will just visually go away. Well, certainly fun so far. We've got that detailed drawing down and now we've started a sketch to put various types of furnishings into context. Let's go ahead and flush that out.
11. Furnishings in Context: We've got a good start on this black and white line sketch that's going to help us put these furnishings in an urban context. In this case, we're not constructing a formal perspective, we're just eyeballing things to get the placement correct. Now, if this were a one-point perspective and it is. We can tell because I'm going to draw some people in here, an eye level line about like this so you'd have more people over here. We'd want to let these streetlights gets smaller as they recede back into the street. I'm just going to fake that effect in. Let's say if it's going down like this, my next streetlight is going to be about here. There goes my pole, something like that. If this continues sweeping down this way, my next one is going to be something like this. Yes, I'm just eyeballing this. There's probably all parabolic mathematical equations you could use to figure out exactly where that goes. Is that how I do it? No. I eyeball it. That's good enough. Let's put some repeated pots with plants to make an edge so that people understand that this is walking area and this is trolley area. We'll put some big coarse textured plants in there. Coarse textured, that's a landscape architecture term, which means thick and juicy or something like that. I'm going to go ahead and put some shadows down on that. Let's jump across and say if we've got a light here, let's put one about there on the other side. Again, look at how fast this is going. These don't look interesting enough so I'm going to add these little crossbars on it. You could almost think of it in terms of, again, being a little cartoony, but it's getting the job done. On this side of the road, they'd be another one about here. It's further away, so it's smaller. We'll do it like that. Just with these few furnishings, I've got enough going on that we can see that there's depth, there's action happening in here. It's another ubiquitous furnishing. That's a 1970s style. You know what it is. Waste container. This is looking pretty good. Let's give it a little bit more context. Some buildings. They're going to come around something like this. We've got more people walking around here. This is going to be fun. I can tell this is going to be a good time. Let's put in some street trees since we know how to do that. See what we've got now is that this trolley, the way the street bends, is really forming a nice little urban open space here that can be full of people. Whole life between buildings thing. Let's put a bench here and have at least one person sitting on it. Let's see our eye level line is about here. The way that I draw benches is to draw the person sitting on them first, like so. Let's just say that this is person sitting on the bench, their arms out like this. Bench is going to be shadowed underneath. Depending on the bench design, it's going to have either metal or wooden rods or something. There's some that are sheet metal that are bent and that thing. I don't care for those, so I'm not going to use them in this drawing. This is my little world I'm inventing. Legs coming down. They'd be a shadow under this person. Maybe further back, there's more benches, so I'm going to draw some people back here. Boy, as you can see, I don't lose any sleep getting these benches in. They go really fast. Let's do another one. When I would design plazas like this, places for people. I would not just have a bench area, I would have whole batteries of benches so that it really became a social hub for folks. They'll be some pavement edge on both sides. They'd probably be some type of building over here on this side. Just a little bit of detail there. I think that we're about done. We've got pots, we've got benches, we've got street lamps. Because there's all those wonderful amenities, there's so many people walking through here. Just a nice spot. This is looking pretty good. Maybe there's windows along the first floor of that building that add some transparency to that wall, make it a little less of a barrier there. There's a little more sense of transparency. I think that we are good to go. Let's add a little color. That sketch turned out very cool considering I didn't really know how it was going to end up when I started it. I think we've got something that's going to be really fun to work with in terms of color. That's what we're going to do in the next lesson.
12. Adding Color: Furnishings: Hi and welcome back. We've got a nice little drawing here now that we've included lots of different types of furnishings in, and we're ready to add color to it. Now, we're not going to do a full-blown painting with this thing. We're going to concentrate strategically the color where it makes the most sense to emphasize those things that are important, which for us is going to be the furnishings, the trees, and vehicles represented by this trolley cars. Let's jump in, paint along with me. I've got a couple of things mixed up over here. Why don't we just drop in some sky, very loose. Put a little water on it and it'll take off up into the sky maybe a little bit of cobalt. That looks better. Put some Naples yellow over here. I'm not going to go on a bunch of detail on these things, but I want to be able to see the context that we're talking about, the fact that there are buildings in here. Well, I like that. Put a little color in these trees. How fun is that? What a great way to spend an afternoon? Put some green around that so we can see that street light a little better. Pop the street sign out a little bit more. We've got our little regulatory sign here, Do Not Enter. The more little details like that that I can have in one of these cityscape drawings, typically the happier I am with it. I really enjoy having those types of details. I'm not sure, let's see, maybe a little, that's a little too much. Putting a little lavender, these are typically pretty dark. I just dropped a little green and blue in there just for fun. I've left a little bit of light streaking in that one there. I might even highlight that just a little bit with a tab, a yellow. We'll just keep moving through this thing. Just put some color on these people. I'm going to start with an orangey mix and maybe just add to that and a couple of places, just let those blend together. That's some cobalt blue that I just drew in there, let's see how that works out. It does look like a crowd of people, doesn't it? That's a great thing. We'll keep that theme going for these folks. This is red turquoise, it's probably enough of that. There's our nice little coarse textured plants. You see what I'm doing here is I'm just really highlighting the furnishings, so that we can have them stand out. Little bit of Viridian on these benches. Benches in Paris and in New Orleans, big surprise those would be related, are done in this really nice almost black, green that is just again, a way to see that French influence on the history of the city, it's nice. I've forgotten our little trolley back here. Let's see what I want to do with that? To get started, I'm going to put red down here after that dries while it's dry I'm going to come in and put in some shadows. Let's see, I've got a street light there, I'm going to throw a shadow across, I got one there. I'm going to throw a shadow across some people. That helps just about any street seen that I've ever worked on, is just to have those strong shadows going across the street. They don't necessarily have to be shadows of any particular thing. They might be cloud shadows, they might be any number of things. If you took the class just previous to this, on a great sketch and five-step, you saw a lot of that kind of thing. Right here in the foreground, just adding some spots and some leaf litter, helps show a sense of depth there that you wouldn't have this level of grit as your eye went further back. Some paints on these people, pick up that blue here, nice I like that. Oh, the trolley. Thank you. Was quite dry, was it? It's all right. I know what a trolley needs. We've got this thing coming up to guide it along this electrical wire, let's turn the corner since the streets turning like this and we'll have the guy wires for the trolley as part of the street furnishings as well. That's nice. That was a good addition. I'm glad I thought about that. We could go on and on and on, but you get the idea of the street furnishings, there are the benches, the waste receptacle, the signs, the street lights, all working really nicely with the street trees and the people. You've got a lot under your belt. You've learned to sketch cars, trees, furnishings, and this last set of exercises, we're going to pull all those together into an eye level perspective that has a lot of depth and character. Let's get started.
13. Final Sketch: Perspective: In this last demonstration, we're going to be pulling together all the things that we've talked about and the previous ones, before we do, let's take a quick look at the drawing that we just finished. I really enjoyed this process and we went a lot further with it than I had intended to. This is a pretty much a full blown demo, but it's got a lot of the things we've been talking about in terms of the trees, the street furnishings, the lights, these poles holding up the tables, benches, waste receptacle, pots etc. It's pretty good representation. I still got one that I want to do though, and it's going to pull together all the things that we've talked about up to this point into a simplified one point perspective that incorporates the street trees, the furnishings, a couple of different types of vehicles and a line drawing first and then with color. Here we go. Like so many other things, I'll grab my pen. This is Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen, an F. I'm going to go with a relatively fine line weight here. I'm going to start with a person hanging out in what will eventually be a bus stop. But for right now, I'm going to draw a line here that's roughly representative of him standing on a sidewalk. Now, if we say that's five feet, this sidewalk is about, I don't know, 10 feet. I'm going to go a little bit wider than that. You see what I'm doing here? If this guy's five feet, now laid him down on the sidewalk, it make about two of those. That's where I got this 10 foot sidewalk from. I'm going to put a little a curb right there, and then I'm going to extend a line, this direction, and we'll see how far we are going to extend it. I am going to start with a bus now. Again, think of this in two dimensions. We've got a sidewalk. I've got the beginnings of a street here. If that person is five feet tall, lets lay him down one, two, and an 11 foot lane is going to be about that wide. That's what I'm going to use to gauge the size of my bus, and it's going to be almost twice as tall as this person is. I'm going to come in and draw a big rectangle like this. That's going to be the front of the bus looking directly at us. We can go ahead and put on a bumper. We can put on headlines. Let's see, he would be coming to us. He's on the correct side. Roof up there, some struts. We'll eventually get down here and put in some undercarriage and wheels and all that business. But before we do that, I want to show you how we're going to set this thing up. I'm going to draw this city street. I think I'm going to put in one lane, maybe a middle suicide lane, and then a lane on the other side, over there. If that's one, I'm going to repeat it again about there and I'm going to repeat it again about there. Did I get out measuring a ruler and measure this stuff? No, I'm just eyeballing it, and you can do exactly the same thing. When we get to the other side, I'm going to want another 10 foot sidewalk or so. Then we're going to have buildings on either side. I'm going to draw the front of the building face right here, just a line representing it. If this is my 10 foot sidewalk and that person is five feet tall. Well, let's say that the first floor of my building face is going to be a little more than twice the height of that person. Why is that? Because in a downtown, the first flour is typically, retail, restaurants, galleries, that type of thing, and they have that high ceiling. Subsequent floors do not. We're going to draw out something like that and say, "That's the front of my building." There's something similar over here. When let's say we can draw a person over there. What do I got to need to do to do that? My eye level line. Remember that. This guy's head is right here, eyeballs right there, we're going to extend it across to the other side. There's a person carrying a briefcase, hand in his pocket, on the other side of the street. Now, I've got these points that I want to create this one point perspective with. I've got an eye level line. What else do I need? Vanishing point. Good. In a scene like this, if I'm in the field and I'm drawing, I will stand right on the edge of the sidewalk, right between the curb and the street, so that I can get a good view of what's happening in the human realm over here, and a pretty good view of what's going on out in the street as well. This allows me to do both. It also greatly simplifies drawing this bus because we're just basically having it come right at us. But watch this. Here's the magic, is to create a one point perspective. All I've got to do is go to this vanishing point, remember, that's what that is, and connect the dots. I'm going to go from there to here. Straight from the vanishing point to this corner, I'm going to go from the vanishing point to that little tick mark, and from the vanishing point to that little tick mark. From the vanishing point to that one. That's a three story building. In one point perspective, I'm going to put a little sign band on there that'll come in handy here in a minute. Now, here's the curb. I'm going to go to my vanishing point and pull that down just like that. I said this was one lane in the street. I'm going to go to the vanishing point and I'm going to pull out a line going like that. That's our lane in one point perspective. It's getting wider as it gets closer to us and narrower as it goes away. Vanishing point to the next lane. Nice. Now this line is a little further away from us. It is going to look narrower, but it's still going to be fatter at one end close to us and narrower as it goes away. I'm going to go to my vanishing point to this other curb over here. Look at that. There is a three lane street in one point perspective going over to the sidewalk on the other side. We're talking about vehicles, trees in the city, and furnishings. That's what we're doing in this lesson. Let's go with a tree. Just like we learned in the previous lesson. We're going to put him right there. I'm going to extend that sidewalk a little bit that direction. That's where our first tree is going to be. Before I fill that out though, I know that I'm going to want to come in here with lots of furnishings, street lamps. I want to put a clock on this wall over here. Some really interesting things and even some nice pavers in the sidewalk here. Let's do one of those historic street lamps like we did in the last little bit there. We'll just take that New Orleans thing and put it right down here in this town center that we're drawing at this point. I'm going to want it about here I think. You see I didn't have that line just exactly where I wanted it, but I didn't freak out. Don't erase. Don't do anything like that. Just draw it again. That's called restatement. It's a very artistic thing to do. Since we've just drawn this lamp in the previous lesson, I've speeded it up and we're going to get it on here relatively quickly. We're going to have a street sign, regulatory sign, and then extend the poles down to the sidewalk, widen the base, and there you have it. We'll come back and darken some of this stuff in. For right now let's drop our tree in. I said we're going to have a tree right here. But I knew that these things were going to be in front of it. This is a foreground element that's allowing us to look past it, and see the peoples, see the cars that type of thing. I wanted to get this in before I drew all these tree branches. But now let's draw the tree branches. Remember our primary branching that we did in our tree lesson just a bit ago. Pull off from there, come in with secondary branching. This sign is going to stay very light. I'm beefing up the limbs around here to create a medium value around that white. Well, let's thicken up this trunk a little bit. That looks right, doesn't it? Nice street shade. Atmospheric dots. You mustn't forget those, we may add some more later. In this lesson, you've learned a quick way to set up a one point perspective. I think that'll serve you well in lots of different circumstances. In the next lesson we're going to flesh that line drawing out and complete it. Here we go.
14. Final Sketch: Fleshing It Out: All right. We've got a pretty good start on this line drawing. Let's continue to flesh it out and create a believable street scene. We're going to go over to this side, we're going to have street trees on both sides. We're going to have another set of buildings over here, and they're going to roughly mirror this one. There's my first floor, second floor, third floor, and same vanishing point, folks. Let's go and mark off those floor levels. There's a sign band. There's the first floor with the restaurants and retail and whatnot. Now, our buildings are going to fade back into the distance this direction because of this one point that we're dealing with. I'm going to go ahead and do that. How far do I want it to come? I'm going to put a park back on this back section with a sculpture and trees and all kinds of interesting things. We're going to learn some quick ways to do that as well. I want to stop these buildings right in here, some place so that we can look through and see that park back there. Let's put our building like that. It's broken up into smaller stores and things like that. You get the idea. Let's carry these lines across, and let's put on our street tree on this side. Since we've done this tree so many times, let's speed it up a little bit. You remember primary branches, some secondary branches, fill up the trunk out just a little bit, and bam, we're home. If we had a row of these trees down here, and they're roughly the same size, same species and whatnot, they're going to follow this rule of one-point perspective also. I'm going to cheat a little bit to show you what I'm talking about. Here's our vanishing point, and I'm going to draw a very light line. I think that you can see that. Put our trees like so, so that this tree and this tree, I'm drawing them at the same size, only this one's further away and in perspective, so it looks smaller. That's how we're contributing to a sense of depth. That looks about right. What else do we want to have in here? All kinds of things. I'm sure we're going to fill up this sidewalk with people. There are more or less lined up on that eye level line. These look a little lower because it just seems to me instinctively that they ought to be as they get further away. There's a whole herd of folks downtown on a nice day walking in a retail wonderland, I'm sure. I'm creating individual shop windows there, is what I'm doing with that. We'll do the same thing over here eventually. I'm going to pull vanishing point, pull this building down a little closer this way. That line will go up to meet it and we'll cut off the sidewalk about there. Now, we've got an eye level line here. What did we learn in our very first Skillshare class about drawing people? That in a perspective scene like this, if the artist is standing, and if all these other people are standing, all their heads are going to be on the same eye level line. So let's take advantage of that and create a sense of depth. Person walking down the sidewalk. That's interesting. I mean, obviously this guy's big compared to that guy, but they're the same size. This guy's close, that's far. This is here, that's there. It's a magical way to immediately introduce a sense of depth into your drawings. Now look, I'm putting these people, their eye level just the same. They're looking into these shop windows with hands in pockets. We'll put just a v neck on that guy. We won't get too fancy with him. There's a base on these windows and then we're going to show individual shop windows like this. They'll continue down this way. Street looks pretty empty, let's put a car in here, or two. Remember our middle third? There it is. I'm going to come up and put a wheel well, oops, that's too big, and another wheel well. Pull that body up like this, like so. Put my stretch scene, and I'm going to have to draw right through some of these guys. But when I put color on it, that'll sort itself out. Roof is coming like this and then coming down over this wheel. We'll put on a tail light, another tail light. I'll put shadows under here for both the car and for the wheel wells as well. I'm going to put another car further up here, but it's further away, so it's going to be smaller and less detail. There it is, driving away, if you will. We've put another person here. That'll come in handy at some point. This is where I want my park to be, let's work on the background here just a little bit. One of the things that if you've hung around me much, that you've heard me talk about is having vertical focal points at the end of streets, like the Cinderella's castle at the end of Main Street in Disneyland, or famous streets all over the world that have some sort of a vertical focal point right there at the end. I want to do that on this street. So I'm going to switch pens. Since that's further away, I'm going to go with this graphic line maker, and it's got a gray permanent ink in it. I'm going to draw, this could be an obelisk, this could be any number of things, but I'm going to draw it to be a piece of sculpture with a winged hero on it like so. We'll give the winged hero a little bit more platform to stand on there, and a pedestal like so. It's a park so I'm going to add some trees. Now, remember this little drawing, foreground, middle ground, background? Here's our middle ground trees, which is basically what we've got going on here. The background trees really there, it's just a mass and that's what I'm indicating here. Nice to have all these drawings laying around to talk about. I'm using this gray pen to darken it a little, but not too much. If I went hard black with that, it would look too close. It would look closer than I want it to be. Let's see. We'll shade this side of that thing. That looks nice, doesn't it? I'm going to pull these trees across to the other side. We have got a pretty interesting street scene coming together. All right, we've got a pretty good start on this line drawing. Let's continue to flash it out and create a believable street scene.
15. Final Sketch: Details: All right, this line drawing shaping up very, very well. Lets continue to add detail. Please draw along with me and post your progress in the projects gallery. Let's put another tree. I'm not calling out primaries and secondaries at this point because I don't want to insult your intelligence. You've got this, I know you do. In a lot of these walkable pedestrian districts, we will take the sidewalk and where we want people to cross the street, we'll flange it out and give him a little extra gathering place before they crossed the street, call it bow about actually, then put our crosswalk there. I'm going to do that here. The end of the bow about is going to line up at the vanishing point. I'm just going to make it an easy mark there like that, and then I'm going to pull this thing at an angle. That's where I want it really, and something like that. Now, in order for this not to get too visually confusing, I'm going to have to come in and do some darkening on this street light so we can keep all this stuff straight. This is the Duke Fude Nib Pen, you can see the bent nib on there. That's a calligraphy pen and still wonderful, wonderful drawing tool. That's how that street lights going to look. We could do some interesting things with color, but I'm just going to darken it in I think, for now. We'll leave it like that for right now. I've got a street light, it's going to be a little more rounded on the bottom because these poles are rounded. It'll come into the pavers, something like that. I mentioned pavers. I'm going to go to my vanishing point and we're going to say that this part, the bow about part of this sidewalk has got old bricks or paving stones, or something like that. Didn't quite dry, isn't? I'm going go to my vanishing point and pull some lines down like this. This will be familiar to you. If you've already done the great sketch in five steps class. This is just like when we drew the paving stones coming out from the Church in the [inaudible] , and they all went back to a central vanishing point. When you guys posted your projects, it was really clear that everybody got that. Now, we're going to put in the individual paving stones, stacked in a running bond pattern, like bricks are often down on a wall. We're going to put them right here on the street floor. I said these bow about to a crosswalk. It looks silly just sitting out there by itself, so I'm going go ahead and put a crosswalk in, light line with my fine liner. Here's the other side of the crosswalk down here. I'm going to make it one of these is striped going across. Our stripes are going to be like these lane markings. They're going to go back to our vanishing point as well. Let's see, did I get that about right? Yeah, I did. Let's do it like this. Vanishing point, boom. Vanishing point, connect the dots.Boom. Vanishing point to here, connect the dots, and let's do one more, vanishing point like so, there's our crosswalk. Since we had a bow about on this side, there do probably be one over here too, but we're not going to get into that much worry about it. Our bus and our cars look a little two-dimensional to me. We have a vanishing point here. I'm going to hold a roof of the bus and the bottom of the bus, in fact, toward that vanishing point, and put in some windows on this side. I'm going to add some interior windows, I'm going to put a shadow under the roof of that bus, some interior details back there. I think we determined last time that the front of the bus is usually got a dark color there by the dashboard. Just wouldn't seem right without passengers on the bus, would it? Now, we're going to have some fun because I'm going to take this. This is a Pitt Artists Pen too. But it's a 1.5, which is a really thick line, like that. I got to be careful with it, but that's what I'm going to use to put shadows under this bus, like so. Now that bus is big and heavy, and it's sitting on the ground in a way that looks real. I'm going to do the same thing over here with this automobile. Pull-down shadows, here you can see the wheel wells. I'm going to draw those like that so that it looks like there's hubcaps and all that but you can't see the bottoms of the tires because it's in the shadow, because that convenient. I'm going to push shadow under that one up there, which helps us recognize instantly that that's a car. Well, let's detail these buildings a little bit. I'm going to put a roof on there. I mentioned perhaps coming in and putting in some signs. I talked about a clock, maybe something like that. I think I'm going to put that clock in here. I probably know better because that's just going to end up being something that I've got to detail later on. What time? Five after three, works for me. The front of that, this is the side that's facing us as we're walking down this sidewalk. This part that faces the street is going to go back to the vanishing points. I'm going to pull it down, about like that, that looks about right, and put in the round clock face like that. The bottom edges like that, are going back to that vanishing point as well. Then we've got a horizontal there. We'll put a little ornamental top on it, like so. We'll say that it's held to the wall or some type of a bracket type thing like this. As matter of fact, we'll pull down brackets like this and extend that down so that that clock actually has something to support it there. Another person here, you'll see why in a minute. I'm going to put a sign over here, JOES. That shows a lack of imagination, done that. I'm putting JOES there, I'm going to put in some second floor windows and some third floor windows. I don't know if I'm actually going to darken any of that in at this point or not. For right now, I'm just going to leave it like that. I hope you enjoyed flashing out some details on that line drawing. You're asking, what could possibly be left? Well, we really need to add some darks to get some snap and some contrast. That's what we're going to do in the next lesson.
16. Final Sketch: Darks: It's time to wrap up this line drawing with some darks and a few final details. Let's get started. I'm going to put windows up in here, but I'm just going to hint at them, I'm not going to make them solid black or anything. I'm going to draw this in such a way that you can tell that there's windows back there through these tree branches. But we don't want to get real detailed with them, do we? One lonely street light. Let's give him some partners. Let's see, here's a guy who's eye level is at five feet,so it's roughly twice the height of this guy. If I go twice the height of these guys, this street light is going to look something this. It's between the two trees. Let's go between these next two trees, going back to the vanishing point, these things are going to line up along it and be roughly twice as high as these shoppers. We'll put in something like that. You even put one down here. At this point, I could start to come back in with watercolor and start very light and put in darks and whatnot. But I'm going to go ahead and finish this out as a black and white sketch. We'll just do some really light watercolor washes on some of it. I'm darkening in the shop windows. Remember a minute ago when I said, you'll see why I'm putting these people in front. When I do these dark windows, if you've just got a bunch of big black rectangle scenario, it looks terrible. I like to have people or something in front of those windows to break up that dark space. As I continue with inking these windows, I just want to make a point that don't be afraid of using black on this. Some of my students have been told never ever do that. In a situation like this, it really works well. Bottom of this clock will be pretty dark, I bet. That looks more solid now, just doing that then that will darken this stuff. You'd be able to see those a little bit better. Now let's jump to the other side and I'm not going to do too much on that first window there. Come down or round my figures. Maybe we had some over here. Not much. These roofs are typically pretty dark. Moment of truth. I'm going to get this 1.5 Pitt Artists Pen. Like we did in the last demo, I'm going to use it just to pull some horizontal shadow lines but you got to be careful with that. You can sure overdo it. In the last one I like to put in some little leaf litter and dirt and whatnot in this foreground. They trick the eye into thinking, we can see a really incredible level of detail here with these fallen leaves and whatnot and specs of dirt. We must be very close. I don't see him here, so that must be far away. We're tricking the eye basically into believing that we've created a three-dimensional situation here, when you and I both know that it's only a flat sheet of paper. It's two-dimensional. Pretty cool trick. If you can pull it off. Now you can, because you know how. Putting some shadows on some of these clothes on these folks. Maybe a dark shoe here and there. What else? That's a lot of stuff, folks. Let's put a name on the street. We had Eve's Street on the last one. This I'm going to get this 1.5 and draw an edge to it. It would be a black border on a historic street sign. We'll do the New Orleans trick again and round these corners. Give it a little bit of character. I need a short name, don't I? I'm going to call this Palmst Street. Put some serifs. I'm laughing because this letters are really wonky. But I like that. I like the added character that it gives to this whole thing that leans a little bit of informality to the whole business here. There's [inaudible]. What do you think of that? I think that's pretty cool. To help with the foreground, I'm going to pull some leaves down here, like there's a branch hanging over from a street tree that would be next to us or beside us as we're walking down the sidewalk. I am just doing it very lightly because I'm going to come back with watercolor. How's that? We'll use some water color there to give another element of foreground here. We've got this now, we got this shadow down here. We're in pretty good shape in terms of creating a frame for this thing. All right, we're finished with our line-drawing. Find your palette, finds your brushes, and we're going to put color on this.
17. Watercolor: First Wash: All right, I hope you've got your palate and your brushes ready, some water in a container off to the side, we've got a great line drawing here, but I really want to start to add some emotion and some drama with some color, this is going to be fun. Okay, we're going to come back to this nice drawing and start to add some watercolor washes over the top of a lot of this ink work. I've got my trusty pallet full of Daniel Smith colors here to work on, and I'm going to do the sky first with this Sable brush. Let's just jump into that and see how dark, not very dark, is it? I really like this combination of the two blues together and I can work the darker with the lighter back and forth. You'll see that I'm not going to do the whole sky up top edge of the page, especially when I've got a vertical focal point like this sculpture column. I like for that vertical to extend beyond the sky color just for drama and sun energy, I like that effect. So we're going to finish up the color here and I'm not going to do splatter until a little bit later. That's looking all right. I'm going to soften up some of these edges. That looks really nice, don't you think? Yeah, we'll get a couple of splatters up in there, and it will look finished. Let's get some Naples yellow, and like I very often do, wash it over buildings, sidewalks. I'm going to apply this Naples yellow over, what I think of as all the hard surfaces, in this case, I'm talking about the building facades and the sidewalk pavement are the two things I'm covering here. I have used Naples yellow for this for many years for a couple of reasons. For one, having it underneath everything else in terms of the subsequent washes, ties the whole composition together when you're done, it's very subtle, but they're all in the same family because they've got this yellow underneath. That also gives a subtle glow to the whole thing when you're done. I have people write me occasionally and say, "Your drawings make me happy and I don't know why." Well, between you and I, this is one of the reasons why, and I find that Naples is exceptionally good for that. I'm going to warm up this area with the paving stones on it to level, like so, even a little more red. It's fun, ain't it? I think so. That little bit pulls the foreground up toward us also, which is nice. Let's put a little yellow in these trees in the middle ground, Naples yellow and cad yellow deep, obviously we're going to be pretending that it's fall here, and there's more to it than just thinking in terms of a fall color scheme. I like to choose color schemes that try to evoke an emotion or a response in the viewer, and that's pretty calculated with me. I did the same thing in my urban design work, trying to come up with forms and textures and colors that would raise the spirits and that would create places that people felt good in, places to flourish, if you will. In choosing these types of colors that just excite the eye and speak to a joie de vivre, a joy of life and exuberance, a sense of optimism is something, again, that is very intentional in the way that I choose these things. It's not for everybody, but it's important to me, like the choice of music here, this wonderful Cuban combo music. I'll be quiet and let you enjoy, if you feel the need to take a break and dance, be my guest. I'm going to use that same mix to put some green on these trees back here. I may come back, I probably will come back and darken these a little bit more. Now that actually looks pretty good down there. We're going to get away from the trees a little bit and we're going to add some water color to these people. You'll notice that I'm going about it in the same way that we did in that last demo. It's a little different than my typical approach. I'm going in with some yellow-orange and really dabbing it on everyone along there, so that like the buildings with the Naples yellow, these guys will all have a common undercoat to them so that when I come back here and put on the turquoise and some other colors, these folks over here on the right will all be related from a color scheme standpoint, because they've got that common undercoat. I'm struggling a little bit more than I should be because I'm using a big fat Sable brush on some of this, and what would work better is a big fat synthetic brush that holds its point a little bit better. We'll come in and place more of these things with that brush. Okay, we've got our first washes down, if you will, go ahead and post that, your progress to the project gallery, and then in the next lesson, we'll go ahead and add another layer of washes as well as some shade, shadow, and detail.
18. Watercolor: Second Wash: We've had fun putting on that first layer of washes. Let's go in, add another layer of washes, some shade, shadow, and details. Paint along with me and post your progress when we're done. Notice I'm leaving the street as whitespace, I may come in and put a little bit of gray wash over there, I may not, I may just leave it as white space and let my shadows from the tree and whatnot come and really make that more interesting. Let's put some pants on some of these people with some Prussian blue. They won't all be that unless I just get carried away and can't stop myself, which happens quite a lot actually. That's nice. Isn't it? Yeah, and I see these people, the colors on them are all muted, and that's a good thing. They shouldn't be as bright as these people that are close to us. So low, what is that? Burnt umber is what that is. That's sky in it. I may just leave his shirt white. Would probably be the smart thing to do. We'll put some color on his man bag. We can play with this wall a little bit, but I don't want to very much because we're going to put shade on it. Put some grass in front of that monument there. As long as I'm doing detailed stuff, we can come in and paint the, do not enter sign. I'll put some shade across here and there. Let's put some shade. I'm going to go back to my sable brush. I've got my trusty mix of Alizarin crimson and Prussian blue to come in and add some shade. It's pretty dark, but I think it'll be all right. Come back and add some shade to these walls. I'm going to go right over Joe's there, but I'm going to come back, I think with something to pop that back out. Let's bring this color drawing in for a landing. All we've really got left is a few details, and what my daughter call sparkle, that would be fun to add. Then one last element in the foreground to really give us a nice frame. Here we go.
19. Watercolor: Adding Detail: Welcome back. Let's add those final details in that last foreground element in this lesson and that will complete our color drawing. Paint along with me. So let's continue. I'm going to go ahead and start to flavor some of these walls on the other side over there. Now let's speed up a little, as I've put a second wash of water color on top of these buildings to the right. That's a little cobalt blue back in the background there because that's the most distant building. Liking how that looks, and now I'm going to go with some Alizarin crimson on the next one over here. Remember I'm trying to make these look like individual storefronts, but I'm letting those colors bleed into each other. Just a bit. I like that Alizarin enough that I'm going to add it to a building and then add some Naples between the two Alizarin crimson, and it looks like we've actually got individual storefronts there, which was the point. A little Prussian blue at the top to separate those trees from the wall, and we're good to go. Stripe some blue across here, but leave some light. I like to highlight these bulbs with just a little bit of yellow. It's a nice transparent effect. How about this clock? Let's put a little really light yellow just on the face, keep it from being quiet, and maybe we'll come in with a cooler color. Maybe this meridian or something. This great clock is actually based on one that I saw in Edinburg, Scotland that I sketched while I was there, on side of a building. That's one of the reasons that designers really should sketch out in the field because these types of details become things that can come back to you when you need them either in art pieces or when you're working on design. All applications, this is just a great thing to do. So I'm hitting it with this Viridian and hitting it again, and I'm going to add a little Prussian blue to it. There it goes. To darken it up, especially around the yellow face of that clock and I think that it's looking pretty good, like that for now, except could give it a little more umph to these things. Look that Prussian blue adding some to these windows, and that's getting a little more interest and lavender to that one. Looks good. We're speeding up a little again. You can see I'm putting some cobalt teal blue on these windows, and look at the sparkle that it gives those. It really just makes a great difference enough that I'm going to take some straight out of the pan, and put it on these dark windows on the left side of the street and even streak some on the shadows on the wall, the shadows could use a little enlightenment. That's what I'm trying to do here, is just give them a little more visual interest. I'm even going to add a little Mayan orange in here to help with that, and I think that it's livening up those gray shadows just fine. I'm going to come back and put just a little bit of Naples yellow on that street sign, and finally, tail lights on the cars is one of my favorite things. Now, I'm going to pull more of these shadows across the ground. I'm going to turn this brush almost sideways to do that. For a couple of reasons I can get a little bit better, dry brush effects. You can see there, and it's easier to control for me to carry a true horizontal across. Put a little of color on this base. I think we're pretty much there. A little bit of the ray on this sky, very faint, that's enough. Here we go with a nice shadow side on this beautiful column. That's the Prussian blue and Alizarin crimson again on the shadow side, I'm going to straighten out that shadow just a bit and lighten it up some with the rag and then I'm going to come back with some clear water, and just blur that edge so that it makes that column look a little bit more round. Now let's go ahead and add these overhanging leaves that we drew, and I'm going to use the synthetic brush for this because it's stiff, it's flexible, but it keeps a good point, and so it's able to make these pointed leaf shapes. This will not only give us something interesting to look at, more importantly, it's giving us a foreground that we can look past that frames the middle ground and the background that gives us a much more effective sense of depth. That orange is little bright, I may tone that down later, but I think it really adds something to this particular piece. We're going to bring this in for a landing by adding some splatters right here at the end. Optional of course, but it's something that I think adds a little more visual interest in what I call energy to a piece like this. It makes it more fun to look at, excites the eye if you well, so I'd put some in the sky, and put some blue and some red down along the street, and we'll finish up with a signature. All right, I like how that turned out. Let's take a quick look at it. I did add a couple of things in the studio a little later that I think improved, and you can do the same if you like. I took a cream charisma colored pencil to those foreground leaves, hanging from the top of the picture, and just toned down that bright orange a little bit so that it's a little more yellow. A little charisma colored pencil did that job real nicely. I use that same charisma colored pencil and a couple of others, to add a little flavor to the paving stones underneath, put a little multi color flavor in those things, and I think that that helped as well. This has been great fun. Thanks for hanging in there with me. Remember to post your work in the project gallery and I've got one short clip after this with some final thoughts called that's rap. I'll see you there.
20. That's a Wrap!: Congratulations. You can draw cars and trucks and buses. You can draw a whole range of street trees, and you can draw different types of furnishings. Coolest of all, you can put these together in a sketch with depth and a lot of character, and that's no small thing. You've really accomplished something here. Now, I would love it if you could take your project, both the final and progress pieces and upload them to the project gallery so that I can give feedback if you like that, and you can have a discussion about it with other members of the class. That's always a lot of fun. Leave a review. If you enjoyed the class, follow my profile, find me on Instagram. I'd love to stay in touch with you. Thanks again. I'd love it if you'd come back and join me for the next class in the series until then from Siesta Key, Florida, keep dreaming, keep drawing. Bye bye.
James Richards, Author, Urban Sketcher, Travel Artist, Designer
