How to Simplify in Urban Sketching - A Fundamental Skill

1. Introduction: There's so many interesting things out there to sketch, but sometimes they feel far too complicated. Take a classic cityscape, high-rise buildings, hundreds of Windows, people walking all around cause trees. There's so much going on, but it can feel totally intimidating. Where do we even start? How do we even begin to sketch something so fascinating and get it on our page and feel proud of it. Well, that's exactly what I wanted to show you in today's class. This course is all about the idea of simplifying. Not the idea of making a simple sketch, but the idea of simplifying a complex scene, which enables us to create a sketch quickly and easily, and then build up the detail. Create something full of life, full of that city, hustle and bustle. But without any of that internal stress or challenge for us. By the end of this class, I really hope that you'll feel ten times more confident in the idea of taking a complex scene and simplifying it, you'll understand more about what simplification means. You'll be ready to not just simplify, but also build up the complexity buildup the details on top of that initial sketch. And you'll also understand how to splash on some colors, have some fun, bring some life, but also maintain that structure, maintain that clear image. My name is Toby and I'm known as Toby urban sketch on Skillshare or Instagram and on YouTube. My style of art is loose and expressive and my style of teaching is to get across my fundamental mantra in R, which is enjoy the process. Don't worry about mistakes. Don't worry about being perfect. Just learn, develop, and have fun along the way. That's exactly what we'll be doing today. The idea of simplification, of course, being absolutely key to our interpretation of the world around us. I'd ask that you may even leave this class suddenly seeing the world like an artist seeing the world in these simple shapes. And just suddenly being full of inspiration and motivation to go out into a busy town, a busy street, and capture the scenes onto your page. Instead of perhaps being scared and worried and not knowing where to start. In this class, we'll talk a lot about simplification, not just the buildings, but also with people. Understanding how to get them quickly onto our page as well, will then produce a wonderful project. We'll go through five different stages from ink, two colors, and back to income. Those final bright punchy touches. When you're done, I'd love you to share your project with me, which you can do by clicking on the project resources and gallery below and clicking Create Project. I do. So if you do the class, love you to leave a review which you can do really simply if I just go into the Review tab and clicking Create Review. Um, and of course, I'd love to connect with you about this class on Skillshare by leaving discussions, asking me questions, and also on social media where you can share whatever projects, whatever you do from this class with me directly. So without further ado, let's have a bit of fun. Let's settle in. Have a little think about simplification, simplicity from a complex scene, and get confident in purchasing you already fun, vibrant and interesting sketch. 2. Supplies: Of course, for every great sketch, we need some supplies and that's what we're looking at in this lesson. Remember that the supplies in my lessons are always loose. They're always guidelines, not rules. So I love using pen and watercolor. That's what I'm using, but you can always adapt the exact pen, the exact watercolors, to what you have at home. Also, I'm using today some cardi paper, some sort of rank paper that produces a fun, interesting, vibrant, and textural sketch. But any watercolor paper would be amazing. And of course, just normal sketching paper will also suffice and you'll be able to do everything in this lesson if that's what you've got and if that's what you want to use. Now let's have a little look at some specific that I'm using today. So the first thing to look at is our supplies and this is everything that you'll need. And if you've seen any of my classes before, you know, I like to keep things really simple and flexible. So what have we got? Well, firstly, we've got some paper. Now today I happen to be using what's called cardiac rag papers. This is cotton waterproof paper. It's got these funky edges have a nice texture. And it's a, A5 size or a half letter size and American sizes. And what is it? It's just really lovely, fun paper to use, which really tolerate and plays a dark colors really well. I would recommend watercolor paper if you have it. But if not some good-quality sketching paper will be good enough to get a nice effect with your watercolors and your inks. Next we can move along and we'll be using a pen. Now the exact pen doesn't matter. You can see I've got a Lamy Safari and this has got a carbon black ink in it, which is a waterproof ink. Equally, you could use a fine liner, which is waterproof, something like a unit pen as a classic brand that you could use. I just happen to be using my fountain pen today though. Next to a couple of brushes, I've got a size ten and a size six round brush. Even just having one brush size, something in-between size 6.10 would, would be enough for what we're doing. And then my watercolors. So in here I've got 14 colors. I'll list them all in the project description. So you can see along with all these things, you can have a reference that you can read and look at what I'm using and the alternatives I suggest. We're not going to use all of these colors as we use it, because I will talk to you, tell you which exact colors I'm using and why. But it's not something. I have these 14 colors, but normally only use 567 in any given sketch and today will be exactly the same. There's always little things that we need to remember to add on top of the really big pot of water here. And off to the side, I always have a little tau. This tau means I didn't have to use kitchen roll, but I can still control the amount of water on my brush and make sure I'm controlling my sketching very nicely. That's everything you need. So without further ado, let's move into the lessons. 3. Project Explained: Now, with every great Skillshare class comes a project and say, Let me tell you about our project today. In our project, we will be taking a scene which feels complex, which feels busy. He's got hundreds of Windows, people, cars, trees, and everything else going on. We'll be breaking it down over five steps. We're looking at the idea of simplification, looking at the idea of loose colors, and then building up the detail, building up the boldness to fund and the clarity of the image will produce our sketch. And we will, at the end, feel super confident and super happy with ourselves. What we've achieved. The, the project lessons are actually split into six lessons because that first step of simplification, I want to give you really clear guidance and advice about how to approach it. So we'll be looking first at big shapes and then a little shapes and how the two interact on the page. To reduce something magical. When you've done your project, I would love you to share it with me in the class gallery. You can do that by clicking below on the projects and resources tab. And on the right you'll find the crepe project. Just take a quick snap on your phone and upload that picture. Maybe a couple of sentences about how you found it. And we'll be sure to come back, give you a response and feedback onto your questions. Perhaps even ask you a question in return. We've all explained it's time to jump back into the sketching. 4. Simplifying Architecture - Shapes: So simplification, that's what this lesson is all about. What is simplification? Simplification is the idea of taking something complicated, breaking it down in a way that makes it quick, easy, and accurate to get onto our page instead of trying to sketch the Taj Mahal all at once, instead, we can split it into squares, triangles, circles. And by splitting it into these different ideas, we can easily get it onto our page quickly and without first and without over complicating things. When we've got that on our page, we can then build up the detail. And that's what we'll be doing in our final project. Getting something simple onto a page and then building up the detail, building up the complexity. So we end up with a lively, busy, complicated scene, but without any stress, without any first simplification. Therefore, it is important to all art because all upstart simply on the page as a basic outline. So let's take that idea of simplification. Look at how practically to do at how practically do we use simplification on our page? So the idea is simplification is what I wanted to talk to you about here and show you, especially when we start thinking about these really big, complicated city buildings. And what can be challenging when we look at these giant buildings is looking at how my word look, all that detail that we need to add. Look how much complexity there is that we need to add. But what's important is to step back and stop trying to draw the building. Instead of drawing a building, identify the shapes. And that's what simplification is at its heart. What do I mean by that? Well, let's just build up a building from our imagination. And we'll build it up using shapes. And then what we're gonna do and on final project is this exact same process. But instead of just doing it from imagination, we're going to be finding the shapes and the image and translating them into our page. So when I say shapes, what do I mean? I mean squares, triangles, circles, rectangles, nothing clever. Okay? So using these basic building blocks, we can really quickly, easily build up very complicated teams, but without the fast. So let's take the idea of a shop front will have a corner building with a cafe on the bottom. And it'll be three stories high or grandfather and three stories above that already? Or doesn't this sound complicated? So we're going to start with the idea of the shop front that's facing us. So that's a rectangle. And that rectangle has its on a corner. So it's going to have two parallelograms, or basically wonky rectangle is coming off the side. And we can change the angle to change perspectives. And it looks like it's sloping away from us. And this sounds a bit longer, but that's just different. Size of the shape is nothing clever beyond that, we've got a roof on top of the roof is kinda, it's like another parallelogram. Then at the top, instead of being a parallelogram, It's kind of like a square. And then another parallelogram here. Then we go to a curve which gives us context for the scene. And that's just a line or you can think of it as rectangles. Okay, we're getting there. Now, how do we divide this up? Well, we divide it up into its flaws. And so what we're going to have is a kind of shop sign here. And then a load of openings are canopy is going along here. Same going this way, but then it's like, hey, we just split into houses maybe. But basically what we've done, a rectangle, rectangle and a rectangle. Then the floors above on divided. So we've just got lots of windows and things to think about. So already this is most of the big shapes. Maybe there's a couple of other big shapes we can think of. Maybe we get another rhomboid in here. What's this rhomboid? It's turning into an morning, isn't it? Sending it to the morning we were thinking about we could do the same here. One more here before we decided by k will be no longer shops and back into houses. So big shapes and already we've got a pretty clear understanding of what the scene is. Always done is everything that we've drawn. We can talk about as a shape, a rectangle, a square rhomboid parallelogram. Effectively, they're all wonky Squires on me. And what do we do next? So we've got the big shapes. We go for the distal shapes. So let's start finding leafy shapes. So let's do a adore that can be a rectangle with an ellipse on top of it. And it can have little windows, doors circle to the side of it. And then maybe we got our floors up here so we can have a window. Window and the window, what do they can just basically rectangles going off to the side where we got just a ton of rectangles. This is where it starts to matter. So much less we get further and further away. And it's not about getting the details in, it's about just suggesting them. So even if I am really loose and make nonsensical marks over here, Let's just take two wiggles. Actually, because of the context of this clear simplification, you will, if I leave all this plant. The context of all of this clear simplification means these wiggles, our brain goes, oh yeah, look, loads of Windows. So we don't need to draw everything we can simplify into shapes and vice implying and districts. We get to leave loads of stuff that really leaves look at how loose these windows are. You. Yeah, I'm sure that your brains are going yet. Look all those windows. That's certainly how my brain works. Down here at the bottom is no different. So we can get, really easily, get ideas of bigger windows in. We could even suggest by lots of little circles look as those of bread in the window. Not drawn, Brad, I've drawn lots of circles. Maybe there's cakes, cakes, kinda like rectangles aren't there. Maybe a rectangle with a rectangle on. By just drawing these little shapes, we are gradually building up what could be a really complex thing. Because imagine the other way we could have done this. We could have started here, drawn this window and then drawn all these individual bits of bread, then come up to here and drawn this morning are canopy. But instead we are going to shapes, shapes, shapes, shapes. And before you know it, we've got a building emerging chest from shapes. This is exactly what we're gonna be doing in our final project. And we'll be looking at how just suggesting shapes is all you need to do to create something that appears complex, but it's really easy to do. Now, in the next little video, we're gonna be doing people. And don't forget as little sneak preview people, their head level, which is just below doorways and people are shaped. So look if you can see what shapes I've drawn here. You already heard of the game for our next lesson. 5. Simplifying People: Now I know it sounds easy, it doesn't it? Now we've been through architecture, really easy to apply, but it's obvious they're all dressed. Triangles and squares. What about people? People? They are everywhere. They, they make us seem so much more complicated. They also make our scene so much more interesting, but often will feel put off. But in the main, in case we make mistake, in case we run our sketch. Well, actually, when we think about what our sketches about, about getting the essence of the scene, will realize we didn't need to sketch people realistically. In fact, if we think about it for you and look at our reference photos, we'll look at the people in it and we realize they're only shapes. We can't actually see facial features. We can actually see very much detail. So now we know that surely we can just catch these people quickly simply as these constituent shapes. That's exactly what we'll be looking at in this video. How to break people down into simple shapes so that we feel really confident and happy sketching them. People are scary because we think we know exactly what they look like. When we try and draw them, we try and draw their features. It gets overbearing, it gets messy and it all goes wrong. But what's the solution? Well, the solution, as with so many things, that sketching is simplification. So let's draw a very loose stool scene. And we'll have like a house. Here, will have a big church just right next to it. My clock in front church got a giant door. This It's got a normal door and a couple of windows. You get the idea. So we've got this very least it will seem maybe a little tree alongside know, to add people to the same. Gotta remember, first the scale. Look at these doors. We know people's heads are going to be about here. This is our horizon line coming across here. The horizon line is at head level or eye level, 11, head level being the same thing. So here's my little reminder to myself, head level. Now we want to add the people and it's tempting to try and draw their hair, their heart, their exact movement and body shape. But what are people? Well, I'm going to argue that you can make a person out of a circle, a triangle. And the triangle. That is a person, it might not be the world's most finite person. But remember, I've drawn this the size of the church. What happens if we draw this? The size of a person? So you draw a little circle, a little triangle there, triangle until you are, actually, isn't I quite effective if I do say so myself. So we can keep building up these people and they can be anywhere in the scene. They could be really far back. So this person is back in the park land somewhere. This person is a bit further forward. This person's right beside the tree. So how do we tell how far away they are? Well, that's where their feet and their heads are all on this line. But where your feet are, so the higher-up your feet, the smaller you are and look because the feet are above the bottom of the church. Looks like they're behind the church because the feet are way below the bottom of the buildings. They're really close to us. So now we've got three really simple rules for creating people. And I haven't seen one. The head level which we can reference from door frames is on the horizon line, and they're all about on the horizon line. Two, people are simple shapes. And three, popping the feet down in the right place tells you where that person is in the scene. Now, I know we're all very keen to color them in. Of course, I certainly, I'm feeling a bit cheeky there because it's really me who is keen to add some color. And I'm going to argue that the colors not important. So actually I was going to do yellow, but let's do something different. Let's do something completely nonsensical, and let's do green people. And what's important is we simplified them. And what we want to do is tell our eye that all these objects which look a bit similar, are definitely similar. They're all the same thing. They're not I and our brain will immediately go there people. Even if we make it totally abstract to look, if we make all their heads green, it doesn't matter if they're black or white or young or old. They are all people were making them all the same. Or we could have gone green and blue. We could have gone to different colors. But the idea is to simplify things so that our visual cortex can immediately understand the scene. Then we can make them fully green or we could do something different. We could add different tone color to come down. So let's make them red. So we can add little suggestions of red coming down. Again, this is going to outline your visual cortex. Look at all these things which look a bit like people and all the same. In the context of this image which looks like a church, they must all be people. So all we need to do is apply simple color schemes to simple people. And suddenly we have a really effective sketch. And we'll do a bit more of this in the final step of our final project. So don't worry if this hasn't covered everything you could imagine would do more in our final step of your project. But this is a great starting point. To stop practicing. You'll loose and easy people. 6. Focus on the Focal Point: So this is a little bonus video. So, um, I had a lovely bit of feedback or a question from someone taking this class. And they said that they found the shapes really great and actually really helpful and it did open doors. But when faced with a really tricky scene, often we want to leave things out. A little bit of guidance on how to decide what to leave in, what to leave out, and would be really helpful, so forth. You had that that probably would be helpful, wouldn't it? And that's what we're gonna do today. So we're going to look at how do you take a complicated, a scary image which is a bit overwhelming. Then go, You know what, This is, how I'm going to feel better about it. Here's how I'm going to choose what to include and what to leave out. So I've got this scene here. This is a castle in Romania. Very complicated and all sorts of odd perspective and different shapes and lots of challenges. But how do we decide what to leave in, what to leave out? Well, tip number one is what we have seen. Remember that we can literally always just zoom in on it. As we zoom in, the shapes get bigger, the details get bigger, and we cut out a lot. So one option is instead of just going, well, I've got this photo, I've got this view in front of me. I have to sketch it all. Why not just try zooming in? Why not try just removing some things like that? Now, that's all well and good. But if we don't want to cut out any of our scene, what, what else can we do? So the key about what detail to include is what is important to us in this image. So if we just do a really quick little thumbnail of this, we can start just sketching. Let's say we don't cut anything out. We just do really simple shapes. We've got these trees which are like triangles. Then at the back we've got this kind of a set of shapes forming a small building and we've got this big shape here. And already actually already, yeah, I agree. I've already gone a bit wrong with that shape up there. And there's another shape here which is a challenge. Another shape where we've gone wrong and actually trying to apply equal importance to everything. So what we need to do is take a step back and decide before we start drawing in our shapes, what is going to be the most important bit? And what we mean by that is what is going to be the focal point. And that could be obvious in the image. It could be a person you try to get to personally. They are the focal point. It can be less obvious than it can be very personal about what you find most interesting. Now for me, I find most interesting this time when we started sketching, but in everything else we've got a bit lost. So we can now decide, we're going to start with the shapes there. That's our focal point. That's where we'll expand our effort and our energy. Getting overwhelmed by everything. We're going to extend our effort in a small area. Then do less and less as we move away from it. So let's start now with the focal point. So we've got a triangle at the top. And then underneath that we've got basically another triangle here, triangle shape. And then we've got a rectangle and a rectangle coming down to another much longer rectangle or longer rectangle. And that kind of, I would say you probably call it another one at the bottom here as well. Now if we want, we could keep going. We could go, we're gonna do our small shapes here as well. So we've got a circle and a circle, a rectangle, triangle, rectangle, triangle. And then this is kind of this little cylinder here. Or just think of it as a rectangle with rounded edges. Again, that's kind of part of this focal point for me as well. Now notice how just by simplifying this scene down to just the bits, which is interesting. This is already so much more manageable than this. We also moved it across, so it's now fitting. We've got our rule of thirds. So if we draw a child and divide it like this into three, we want our focal point sitting along one of these lines here are, what are these intersecting points? So that's what we've done. We've got it along these intersecting points. Now. We've also reduced all these little shapes. So although it's really complicated, we kind of turned the entire detail into just a circle instead of the pillars and everything going on, we're already able to just commonly approach just our focal point. So having done that, we can move on and start doing giant shapes elsewhere, but basing off our focal point. So e.g. we've got this rectangle coming out here and here, and another one there. Then this is a giant rectangle here. And it's kinda got a series of rectangles because it's basically a hexagonal tower, this one isn't it? So we got a series of rectangles coming down with a basically a circle on top. And then off to the side. Well, why not just really simplifying this? We just turn it into a rectangle. We now have recognized this isn't that important. We've actually completely cut out some elements. We basically cut out a lot of these trees because they're really not important to the field of this scene. And if we want, we could start adding in a couple of small shapes here. But remembering that we're really, really simplifying now, we can leave this whole bit blank and just empty and happy and leave it like that. Then you go. That is how to approach a scene which you feeling overwhelmed by how to approach it, to think about how are we going to cut things out? How are we going to consider a focal point and how we're going to use our focal point to reduce that anxiety and worry that it's not possible. It's impossible to get this scene on our page in the next video, another bonus video. We're going to continue this, but we're going to think about color in a way that again, uses negative space, too. Reduce the complexity in just to be able to enjoy sketching a little bit more without that worry. 7. Simplify your Colours: So in this short bonus video, we're going to look at negative space and how to use negative space in our painting to simplify, remove that overwhelming feeling from sketching, just as I promised in the last video. So this follows directly on from when we're talking about how to simplify our linework and how to just choose what to leave out. What I've done here is I've basically replicated our simplified, our sort of good version of our thumbnail. And I've done it twice, twice so that I can show you a good way. And before that, a complex way and a complex way isn't necessarily bad, but it's more overwhelming is takes much longer. And for me, it's not how I usually choose to paint. What is the complex way than the complex ways where we decide we're going to paint everything. We would come around our sky blue and we'd make sure to fill the whole sky with blue, because the whole sky in the image is blue. So what we're doing is we're being accurate, which is great. There's definitely a place, of course for accurate sketching. And then what we do we find on our walls and obviously I'm simplifying the colors here. But it's the idea that we would add color to all of our walls and make sure that we've got them all like approximately accurate in the choice of color as well. And then a roofs as well, quite dark, so you just apply a nice dark color. Then around the side I've got these trees and in the front we actually got a few bushes and things. And then we've also got a kind of shadow in this lower part of the tire as well. So it's very simple, but it's still getting there towards painting everything. Now, what's the problem here? There's no problem per se. This is a great way of painting. If you've got loads of time. If you're feeling very confident about your subject, if everything in your subject is of value important, that you're happy to spend a while painting every little bit and ensuring that we kept that different value right here, different value right there. And it ends up looking amazing after a long time and with a lot of thought and a lot of energy. The problem now is that everything is equal as the eye doesn't know where to go, it's kind of become complex for me. The decision of where to paint next, where do I now add color? What colored where it becomes much harder. So how do we reduce that feeling? How do we feel happier when I'm sketching? It's all the same stuff. It's all starting to think about that focal point. We start with our sky again using the same color, but this time, instead of printing the sky everywhere, we focus it around our lovely focal point and we can nice and loose, but we bring it around. So now we've produced a sort of pushing out effect. Our focal point is now basically a negative space in the sky. We can leave it like that. We could actually paint everything except our focal point. Thus, our focal point would jump out at us. Now, if a perfectly good way of doing it, I'm going to suggest doing it the other way around there. I'm going to suggest actually focusing on colors on the focal point whilst being careful to leave some negative space in our focal point as well. What do I mean by that? Well, we can add some nice dark color to this roof again. And we can let that blend and float because as it blends and flows, it will be lovely and leaves. It takes away the pressure trying to be perfect. And also because we've already painted a small area where they're able to react and respond and make sure that the textures which happened now, what we want to happen, when thinking about negative space, we will jump down and we'll just paint this section of the wall. And so we've got this kind of pushed out bit here. Now this is total negative stays really jumping forward at us. And then below we said we've got a bit of a shadow so we can put that shadow in. And maybe you just want to apply a little bit of tone. Some of these windows. Perhaps we revalue the brushes just below a little bit as well. So now we've painted our focal point. And this is just a very quick sketch. But you can imagine if you've done a bigger, maybe it's your final projects. You've done a bigger sketch, you put more effort into the pen work. You could just apply colors really simply like this, just your focal point. And you produce something pretty cool, pretty interesting. Without the stress of feeling the need to color match or get stressed elsewhere. The next level, of course, is to start adding a couple of bits of color as well. So we just look around and think, how do we feel about a little bit of color here? And we're just choosing simple shapes and applying a little color. Stepping back and having a look that directs your eye doesn't it catches the eye and then the eye follows these negative spaces again into a focal point. So maybe what we want to do is keep the idea of going just a couple of shapes which can have some really simple cone, tone, color or value. And by doing that will get me, I drawn. But then it will follow these other negative spaces. Then we can start amping things up so we can come back in and go. This is working. Let's get bold with our color. Drop in some really intense pigment in a couple of places. Now, we now have an image which is bold, punchy, focal point, but not blank. What's the next level that we could very easily do? The next little step we can very easily take, well, instead of painting everything, but if we don't want everything to go to your bank, we can apply some simple splashes and simple splashes. Fill up an area whilst leaving it. Not too much drawing out it makes the image field busy. But without making the image feel overworked or complicate. Just gentle splashes in a few places where he doesn't matter if they go everywhere and then ******* in the sky, those with gentle and careful when it will end up with something which again, just draw the eye. Far more simple to think about and to enact and leaves us flexible to keep gradually building up if we want to. But also flexible to just do something super simple, super quick, if that's what we want. That is my video about negative space. I hope that one is really helpful as well. Do think about this when you're doing your final project, especially if you look at that image and you think, Oh my word, what is going on? Remember the principle is focusing that color on their focal point, allowing the negative space around it to push in. Well, sullen and negative space within it to jump out. At least. That is the feeling I get from this kind of composition of negative space. 8. Step One Part ONE - Big shapes: Okay, So this is step one of our final project, and here's step one, part one. So step one as a whole is the idea of simplification. And in step one, part one, we're being really simple. We are just looking at those giant shapes. So let's jump in and see exactly what that means in practice. I always find it very useful to break down sketches into steps because then we can understand at each stage what we're trying to achieve. So this is step one and I'm calling it big shapes. Why am I calling it big shapes? Because all we're going to try and achieve with our pen and paper is finding the big shapes and our image will be amazing in complicated cityscapes like this. It feels like there was an overwhelming amount of detail to find. But actually we'll come together so easily when we just find those big shapes. We don't have to think about it like city block, tower block. Now we can just think about circle and square and it will magically just come together. So let's do just that. Now I'm going to start with our focal point because it is going to set the scale for the rest of the image and the front of it facing us. What is it? I would argue that it's just a big old rectangle. So there you go. There's our rectangle. Notice how I'm wobbling, wiggling, That's fine. We're gonna be doing lines and color and lines and it's any mistakes or wobbles will just be part of the character of the image by the end. Now above that, what do we have? We've got a semicircle with a rectangle, with a kind of elongated semicircle. Along the side. We've got an angled rectangle. Another one, another one, and another one. Then coming up here off to the edge of our paper, we've got a big rectangle. And then we've got another one, a little one on top of me, something like that. Then we can keep just finding more shapes. Here. We've got a square. Well, I'll miss something I haven't. I so up here we often start the roof, which is yet another rectangle. Then you go, always good to be on your toes because you will easily miss shapes if you're like me, not concentrating because you're trying to with full, more full and talk to you much. But now we can come back to sketching. So what's going on here? We've got a square which is sort of cut off here, but we can still think about it in the simplest term, it's a square with a rectangle. That rectangle kinda comes down. We don't need to draw that line. We can just draw it adjoining rectangle. And then we can draw this rectangle coming down and this one coming down. And there's another one on top and then another one just coming down over here. Do you see how we've built up this half of the scene just by finding shapes. So we can continue to do the same thing. On the other side, will find the mirror or most of these lines, isn't it? And we can just grab those really quickly and loosely. We can't see this shape very well, but we know it's there, so we can either choose to leave it or we could choose to invent it. I'm just going to invent it a bit. You can't really see it. So it's a bit of an invention. Come down and got this shape. This is split into lots of rectangles again. But again, if we just find these rectangles, what we build it up without a problem. And on top it's called a triangle. And then these rectangles all angled down. So we can just find these angled lines. Again as if by magic, we completed that set of shapes. Same little thing falling off here, another couple of rectangles. Then we've got this dry and rectangle coming in here. Just have a look where it ends, where the bottom is, it's just in front of this. So come down a bit lower than here. Then we can bring in that edge of the rectangle and then finish off the bottom of this really, really giant rectangle. And then you go most of the shapes found. There's a couple of other things we can find. Look in the back, we've got this kind of, these trees. Basically circles, don't know. So let's put those in. There you go. That is it doesn't look like much. I fully agree with you right now. This doesn't look like much, but give us time, give us a couple of more steps of our drawing. And this is gonna be looking like a huge amount of fun. 9. Step One Part TWO - Little shapes: After step one, part one, of course comes step one, part two. So what are we doing here? Well, we've got our giant shapes now it's all small shapes. Small shapes are those details, those little bits which just fit neatly. And now that we've got that big structure of our image, what are the small shapes? The small shapes are all those little details that we didn't want to draw in last time. But we're going to keep it as shapes. They're not going to draw windows. We're going to draw rectangles, circles and then kind of thing. We're going to draw them all either we're going to find some, see how we feel. Keep going until it feels full. We can always add more later, remember, so let's grab our Pentagon and we'll start in the same place to start in the middle, we're going to just start grabbing small shapes. We've got a rectangle, then we've got one which is like an ellipsis semicircle with a rectangle. In case you sort of go mad from me saying the word rectangle too many times. I'm not going to keep repeating the word you'll be pleased to hear. But just talk about how I'm simplifying. And so e.g. we can take this row here of shapes and I can't see them all. I'm, but what I can see is a general idea. I don't have to count exactly getting them right. We just trying to get the idea of these windows going alone. The general idea is plenty enough detail. So again, we can just match what we've done down here. And look, I'm overlapping this line. This, this was a dodgy shape here. It's angled in the wrong direction. Whatever, ignore it just had your own new shape on top. And look. We filled it up just by thinking about all these windows in terms of simplest things possible. We filled up this complicated area by just repeating a little pattern over and over. And we just do the same thing over here that we can't really see the windows that were here, can we? Because they are in shadow. So what we can do is make these ones at the front a little more obvious, pretend we can see them. Then as we go back, we just make things that suggests windows which there aren't really that we can see, that we can just simply suggest them. And we can just create little vertical lines. See how it's very dark and shadowy. So these lines are a little bit like hatching, but they're suggesting detail at the same time. Somebody look it up here. We've got this kind of complicated extra bit of detail and we can just bring that in by finding its shapes. And we can sketch on top of our previous lines to see how they dissolve into the background. So there's no drama, no, no fuss about whether we are trying to correct or change our previous things. We can just layer up online so that one's weight gentle, it will, it will look interesting or look fun. This flag is just a couple of shapes and look, we can move the flag to the side so it's more obvious what it is and so it doesn't interfere too much with our previous lines. Similarly, all these details that we sort of filigree type balconies, we can just bring them in with really simple suggestions of line work. Back here. Look at these tiny little windows. I'm not counting them or their phone. Now there's five in the image. I can fit for him. And if someone wants to complain and say that our team is supposed to be five, well, that's fine. But I doubt anyone will ever notice, so don't you worry about getting it slightly wrong either. Again, we can find, look this really dark bit on top. So when we add these dark details with a bit of hatching, then a couple of windows here. And then going down here we can get these windows. And again, just real suggestions or Windows, nothing clever and nothing really challenging to draw, just quick suggestions. And what's happening is if we focus on every single window will be here forever. It will look too busy. But the madness, the detail, the beauty of these scenes where there's, I don't even know how many windows, at least 100 I imagine that we can see is that each of these windows builds up an effect of detail. So even if we are just doodling in a load of rectangles, even if they get wonky. Let's just make this make no sense at all. As I stuck up the windows look, even if I just do to live in like that. The effect of all of these windows, effect of us putting all this data is that it looks busy, it looks correct. It, It's such a busy, complicated image anyway. It doesn't matter if we go a little bit wrong. So when we think about lifting, shapes, just really do simplify it. Don't worry about getting it exact and don't worry if it's not perfect, because no one else will notice if it's not perfect. These trees, I'm going to just bring in a little bit as sort of hatching. This is like hatching is increasingly the value. I'm just replicating the same marks that were initially used to suggest the trees. We could bring in some of these other things in the back. We've got like a taxi. We can bring that in and it's again, a taxi, a car shapes, what does it, it's like a parallelogram. We rectangle with a rectangle and then it's got suggestions of wheels like that. We've got the suggestion of a taxi. Then we've got some people, haven't we? The people, what are they? They are circle triangle. Triangle says circle, a triangle the right way up and then a triangle upside down. We can just sketch a few of these people and we can see them all over this scene. And the key is, as well as their heads at all on about the same level because they're all at eye level that all on the horizon line. We could add a person in really close up here. The head is still going to be level with everyone else's head. It doesn't matter if we go a bit wonky with that. So let's put someone a bit too low here. Again, it doesn't matter. You can't really tell in the busy-ness of everything going on. If we pop a couple of people who are just not quite right, another one here, just all of these people aren't there right next to each other and they're not quite right. But it doesn't ruin the image. It, it adds the busy-ness and it adds to the overall effect. As artists, we're prone to noticing the details of our own art and missing the overall effect. So just try if you can put on someone else's glasses, walk in someone else's shoes when you're looking at your own. And just see the overall effect without noticing every bit that you know you got wrong. Because no one else, so very few other people will know, or if they see those bits. So what else can we do? Let's get some of these windows in up here. Again. Look, are we going to count them? Are we going to just go for it and suggest some busy-ness the same as you go along. If we just match these windows here. Get looser and looser as we get off the edge of the page, I know what it's gonna look great. It's going to look fine, especially as we build stuff up. We can get this flagging. You can get the edge of this big window just really loosely coming off. And we can suggest like a pavement coming around because that suggests it tells us what's going on with the image. It tells us there isn't just this big blank space. There you go. Lift two shapes done. So what have we done? We've done rectangles, we've done circles, triangles, we've done some dual half or semi-circles. We have a sketch which really does represent a busy tools skyscraper each city. Next, we're going to be working out our colors, having a bit of fun and play with them. And seeing how we can develop our sketch further. 10. Step Two - Loose Colour: Now that we have built up that ink work with our lovely little shapes, we can start splashing on some color. So here we're gonna be using a bigger brush if we're using two brushes or if you've just got one brush, of course, just be using your one brush. Loads of water, some lovely loose colors, and seeing what happens with painting the light here. Not worrying too much about other things. What we're trying to do is get this varied wash of color, which blends and merges lots of negative space as well, leaving places unpainted. And not worrying too much that this won't feel structured. But what we're doing is we're proofing ourselves to come back and reapply bit of structure a bit later on with a pen or some more concentrated color. So I'm going to start here. I've got my size ten brush, my bigger brush. For this stage. What I'm doing is that look where, where this shadow, we've got this blue sky shining down this side, we got shadow going all the way through onto this road. So I'm going to link that whole area to start with by touching in some blue. This is cobalt blue, okay, touching up blue and then bringing it down. So already we've linked everything up. Now the next key color is this yellowy orange color. We've got lots of options. We could use agonistic with a nice simple option, one which a lot of people will have, which is quinacridone gold. If you don't have quinacridone gold, just use another yellow. Or you could even make an orange with a yellow and a red, of course, for what this is going to do, just give that glow to this yellow, orange sandstone e feel. We can just pop it in. Again. Look, let it blend and it moves. We can even be really loose. If I tilt my page, I can drop it on and I can encourage the water to flow move. And now we get this effect that there's light pooling down our image. We can come in, we can add a bit more variation by touching in these colors. And it's blending up into the sky. That's fine. Just let it do its thing. Going to bring it all the way across the edge here. And we talked about negative space will look by bringing it across and having a neat edge. Do you see how now these two bigger, closer buildings are providing a kind of frame, this negative space frame, pushing in and pointing us towards the really interesting but image. What are the tones or colors or hues or they're in there? Well, there's a nice red which is coming from this flag. Let's just touch that in and let that do its thing. Then, having used the red in one place, Let's show He's in a couple of other places just to it's not really there and elsewhere is it's not really, they're not pretending it is, but we're making decisions which make the image feel more together. We're gonna be able to use this read later as well when we add in some details, particularly if we look around at the people, e.g. that people are crying out to be punches of color. We've got this red in a few places. We can come back later and find a few more. Now one more color. So what we've got at the moment is kind of like a primary color scheme. We've got primary blue, primary red, and we've got something which isn't quite a primary yellow, but it's a nice yellow. We don't want to over-complicate things. So what I'm gonna do, just take a nice green as simple green. This is our fourth color. That green has got two nice purposes. So one, these trees, each loopy trees that we added in earlier. And to look at this lovely roof, it's got a greenie turquoise. Easy. But we can, again make a decision to simplify, simplify it, to keep the greens consistent throughout our sketch. And here we go. Lovely green roof. We can always touch this gradient and a couple of other places as well. But let's not overdo it. So let's just stop there. Last thing I'm gonna do, a little bit more blue in the sky. Just fill up that sky. Maybe bring it down here to give a kind of reflection. Little joined up fill. And we're done really quick, really loose. The trick with this step is to just have a bit of faith that it's going to be alright. Yes, it looks mad. Yes, it looks leaves. But before long we'll have come back a bolder colors, added some more ink. And the structure we'll come back and these loose colors, we'll add so much complexity and depth to our image, which we can achieve without just letting go for a little bit. 11. Step Three - Bold Colour: Now without page nicely dry, we can move on to step three. Step three, big bold colors. Now we're thinking a bit more about the shadows were thinking about what are those highlights and what are we trying to make a feature of? This is where I've seen really starts to come to life. So let's settle it, enjoy, and produce a bit of magic on our page. Okay, so we're back now. What do we need? We need the same colors. We need a mostly dry page, so mine is mostly dry. There's little bits. You can probably see it a bit damp, but that's okay. It's mostly dry. Now we're gonna be using my smaller size six brush. And it's okay if you only have one brush, but if so, just be careful to use the point because what we want to do now is apply some more dense elements of color to suggest shadow to get a bit more shape into a sketch. How do we do that? How do we get shadow in watercolors? Well, there's a couple of ways. So 11 very effective way is to layer up colors to look if we layer up our quinacridone gold here, the effect is to enrich the tone of that gold. Suggest a lovely shadow. So we can actually use that in quite a few places because it's a more subtle shadow. We can come basically everywhere where we see shadow. We can come, we can add an enriched layer of our gold. We can do the same with e.g. these greens. So coming in down here. And we can just apply the green shadow to the lower edge of our trees. We've got these three tree-like shapes that I've sketched in. Maybe we can add a fourth in there that is applying a greater challenge. So now it looks like there's light and shadow. So suddenly these very two-dimensional trees have this wait to them. They have this punch, they are producing F shape. Similarly, this green, Let's go and just get a much more defined roof. Again, we can imply shadow by leaving some of our previous lovely light green coming through. So we're not trying to cover up the previous line. What we're trying to do is create variation in the previous layer. Now where else is the shadow? Well, there's a few very dark triad is on there with these very dark shadows. What can be quite effective is to use a shadow color. So instead of using darkening, the yellow, darkening the red, whatever it is, we can take a naturally dark color, like I've got indigo or I've got moon glow. So I'm actually going to take indigo and I'm going to mix the indigo with a lid to get the wrong one. Next, I'm going to mix my indigo with a little bit of quinacridone sienna and actually give us a nice neutral dark. A similar thing would be to mix a burnt sienna with an ultramarine or any dark blue with any sort of warm and relatively brownish color. Basically, we're looking at a dark blue and a warm but deep orange, deep dark orange, which is of course Brown. Anyway. What we should then end up with is a lovely neutral dark color. So what we're gonna do with that, well, look, there's some really dark shadows. And whilst our page is still wet, if we apply this dark, dark color and we'll get some lovely soft shadows, will get shadows which blend and flow wheel to even deepen some of the tree shadows. And then especially down here around these people, we can get a really effective deep dark shadows. As we come around to the other side. It's not so much in shadow, is it? Instead we just have neat shadows within someone that windows e.g. and we can do that as well. So leaves but it's flowing and it's continue to evolve even whilst I've moved away from it, it's going to continue to evolve and change. So we don't need to rush and try and put in Pro can make it perfect if what we need to be delicate with it in the first place and then let it do its own thing for a bit. Could do the same. And these buildings back here, just a little bit of a dark corner coming across to suggest that shadow and it will continue to move and flow. If we're not happy it's moving enough. Come back with a clean brush, a little bit of water, and we can just hook it into moving a little bit more for us. Now, the moment we've left a big load of negative space, we can just apply a little bit of tone if we want to this negative space it perhaps these dark areas we wanted to just prove a dark, perhaps wanted to take a lighter wash our shadow color and just gently suggests some of these shadows in here. Whilst also leaving it essentially is negative space in terms of there being no color to it. So it's still got that pushing effect coming across. But it just proves that we meant to sketch this bit in. This is very optional. This is all about experimenting and seeing what you enjoy the most and what you feel adds value to your sketching. We could come in and use some of this dark color as well just to show that there's a tarmac and a texture in this foreground. Maybe, maybe that takes away too much of the light so we can come back in, just poke some of our warm colors back in and let them blend and move and do their thing. So that is this step done. And still you might be thinking, Oh my word, this looks chaotic. But don't worry, we're still not finished and just have that faith that if we follow these processes will come up with a really fun, interesting image. Next, we need to let this dry and windy stood it dried pretty well. So we can come back in with our pentagon. 12. Step Four - Restructuring: Now, with all that, color comes a little bit of a mess, doesn't it? Not a mess, but something which is lacking a bit of that structure. So in this lesson we are restructuring, we're refining the shapes with our ink. And before you know it, what we'll have is a vibrant and fascinating image which really is starting to make a lot of sense. So we're ready for our next step, step four is to regain some structure with our ink. The first thing you might notice is look where it looks totally mad, really. Sort of loose and a lot of very dark darks before. Actually, as things are dry, they become more transparent as watercolors do. That sort of abrasive quality, that high contrast has faded. So we're actually, we've got plenty of room to play with without dark ink. What are we going to do? Well, we're going to start again, just recapturing those shapes. And we might add more details. We might refine some shapes. And a good example of what we're doing is look around this. We can now come and see wherever watercolors gone. You can see there's this little strip of light. So we can grab that strip of light. Now that is suggesting even better is suggesting the shape that we can see in the references suggesting that you got that strip of light going down the side. Similarly, we've got this statue on the top. We can actually just hatch that in with our pen. Now we've got, again, that's just a higher contrast, but we've seen love watercolors are doing, responded to them. Down here we can recapture some of my shapes. You've got these lovely windows and now we can use how the watercolors have given us light and dark and the different sides of the window and we can capture those different shapes again. Then there's this lovely roof. And all we're gonna be doing is repeating ourselves all around the image, grabbing these different shapes, seeing what's happened, responding to what's happened in it, using our reference or the scene in front of us. But we're also using the natural qualities of the watercolor. How they created lightened, dark, how they've gone where they want. And let we might move our windows, we might enlarge some of our Windows. We might sort of make some windows smaller. We can redo some of these lines wherever this line was really wonky. Well look, we can just redo it, re-capture that, that original sort of feeling that we were aiming for. We count down just repeating the same process as we did before. But now instead of just paying attention to the scene, we're also responding to what we've already done. This is a nice bold line. Push and push out our colors and to move on vision across. But we've also added a bit of tone. So this tone is another thing that we can respond to. We can outline it with a pen and make it a definite feature. This doorway here that we can hatch and provide a sort of contrast between that and our man at the very front. Like this. We are building up our scene again, we're building up the structure. And hopefully you can see this part of the scene is outputting forward, back in front of those colors. So you can probably start to imagine what's going to happen as we move around the rest of the scene. And it's just all going to gradually move forward. Those colors are going to fade back. And we're going to regain some of that structure that lets us have a really clear vision of our scene. Let's now move on to this side. Again, just finding the shapes where they've perhaps been lost a little bit, being a little firmer with our pen to create slightly bolder lines if necessary or not even if necessary. But if we just feel that's what the image would like or what would help our image. I'm gonna do this bold line next. Just say that we have an understanding of what a bold line looks like, because we don't want to go bolder than this line is right in the front of our image and the bolder line, the further forward it is. What we want is these, these little lines that were running for Windows to be that kind of visual noise. Remember how I made these windows will purposely wonky. Well, just as long as they are uniform enough, that visual noise is what we'll just create the effect rather than having to be perfect. Absolutely are really neat. Same here. If we just create enough correct suggestions of Windows, we're not going to have to be precise about the numbers, the size, or anything else about those windows. Came back. Same thing here. Maybe Actually now that we've got more tone and value on the page, just hatching in these areas is going to be nice, effective little touch of pen work to again enhance the contrast. These trees, we can, again remember how we hatched, but we can do a similar thing. Now. We've got this taxi again. We can just re-invested bit of pen work into that to make it stand forward of it. Are people now we got to decide are they going to be features or not? And I think because we've talked about adding some fun colors to them, well we can do, let's make them features. So to make them features, what do we do? We bring them forward with some old pen. We can add some more as well. It doesn't matter that we add lines in front of other lines so we can come in, we could add some people here, here. Couple of just going round the corner. I've already got one in the foreground here. Could add another just behind them in the foreground. Maybe a couple more just by this taxi, e.g. and now we've got this scene just filled with people, but hopefully you can see the key parts of this snap. We have now regained a bit of structure. Can you just come round, regained, remember these curved lines? They sort of just, again, they frame the image. They show us what's going on. This shows the flow of the streets. So that for me, quite key part to get in. There we go. So that is our restructuring of the sketch done. It's time now to move on to our final step. We're gonna get our colors out and add those really bold and interesting touches. 13. Step Five - Finishing Touches: Here we go, almost there, time for the final touches. Now just a few little bits and bobs of ink or color. Let's see what we want to do to really bring out those highlights. Make features of the important parts of our scene, and not overdo it, but make sure we've got something really punchy, happy and fun. The final steps here, the final steps, those bold, interesting touches that we've been looking forward to an ordering. I was going to pick some really punchy colors to make features of different things. And the key feature I think that we want to pull out, we talked about it a few times, is these people. So what I'm gonna do to make them stand out, we've used, we use this red, we've used a quinacridone gold, we've used a cobalt blue user shadow color, and we use a nice green. What we're gonna do is we're gonna choose something different. So are people really stand out? So let's start with a yellow. Now. The yellow I'm looking at popping on our taxi first. Now, do you see that this yellow really jumps forward. And the reason it jumps forward is because there's no other yellow like it in the scene. Now if we just leave that there and we don't use this yellow elsewhere, it at least to me, this looks like a mistake. But what we could do is we can make yellow a feature of our people. Look, we can find all the heads of our people. Give them a dotted yellow. And suddenly the yellow makes sense. It's not a mistake. It's kind of suggesting look, all these important features going on at eye level. To double down on that, we can get a bit of a yellow. We can just literally apply some splashes, especially into this negative space here. So now, I hope you agree that a yellow no longer looks like a mistake. It no longer stands out so much except to draw your eye to what we're calling the feature, the, the exciting part of the sketch. Now, what else can we do? Well, I don't think we want to introduce too many new colors. So what we could try now is to pick one of the colors. We've not used that much and make it a feature down here as well. And to go nicely with that, yellow, why don't we use are red. So now these people, we can just add suggestions of red two, we'd have to do with all of them. Let's do a few takes, step back and look. And actually I think if we did more, it'd be too much. So now we've got another decision. Do we want a different color or do we leave the other ones? Why? Wow, what an I take the risk so that you can decide what you want to do with a beautiful wanting. So I'm going to try and blue. And let's just see what happens. But you have a look at what happens and then decide if you prefer yours with the color or without. And then we go, there's a few more bits of color touched in. I think at that point is probably most sensible to leave the others. Why we've taken a risk. For me that's worked. It's providing a really interesting, punchy touch. I'm going to again just double down on these, these funny colors, adding these blue splashes. Know if there's any red splashes because I think it's working quite nicely as it is. And I'm going to call that done. So the most important part is to be proud of what you don't pop your initials on. This is Santiago, Chile. Santiago in the corner. And you can plot the data as well if you'd like, but just be proud of what whatever has happened. We've done some loose experimental touches. It may be techniques that you're not familiar with it maybe, maybe sort of things you're not experienced with. And for me, I never know what's going to happen. These things are loose and it's about responding to what happens with our colors. So mistakes will happen, but mistakes are often very beautiful as well. So didn't worry if there's mistakes, just be proud, enjoy it. Reflect on what went well, reflect on what you enjoyed, and take that into your next sketch. And with that, we can move into the roundup where we'll have a think about what we've done, what we've achieved, and what we can do next to develop our sketching further. 14. Thank you and Next Steps :): And thank you everyone, well done for making it through. I really hope that you've gained a huge amount of confidence. I hope you understand the principles of simplification and are ready to take this out into the big wide world. Creating your own teams, taking things which previously worried you. You just thought there's no way I can do that. But now you are happy jumping in, being able to just simplify, get it on your page and then build up the detail, build up the color, fill up the life. I'd love to see your image. So do click below on the class projects and resources tab and create a project shared with me. And I'll be sure to come back and give you some feedback. If you've enjoyed the class, It's your chance you've made some feedback, so please do leave me a review. Again. Just go on the Review tab below this and just leave a review takes a couple of minutes or even less. I'd love to connect with you outside as well. So follow me, please. On Skillshare, there's loads of classes that I've produced here and I'd love you to join in lots of things. From the fundamental starting classes of urban sketching down to more specialists classes and my favorite things like continuous lines and loosen abstract sketching techniques, if any of that sounds fun, I'll see you in another class or you can come and find me at Toby urban sketch on YouTube, on Instagram, or on my websites where I host and describe all of my other classes and courses. So thank you so much and I hope you've enjoyed it. Most importantly, I hope that you are proud of what you produced. Nothing goes perfectly ever, especially not in sketching, especially not an art. But there's always something to love as well. So have a little positive outlook on Europe. I hope you've enjoyed it and keep creating.