Urban Sketching - 5 Exercises to Loosen Up Your Style

1. Introduction: You're looking to loosen up your sketching and urban sketching, develop characters or line work. And there's expressive, beautiful colors. If so, then you are in the right place. My name is Toby, known as Toby admin sketch on Instagram, YouTube, and of course on Skillshare. If there's one thing I'm known for, its my loose style of sketching an urban sketches. My focus always being on the process, having fun, forgiving mistakes, and creating interesting character for linework with beautiful, expressive watercolors will look at things like continuous line drawing, which is one of my absolute favorite techniques. And I use elements of continuous line drawing in pretty much all of my art. Be that an architectural seen a landscape, a still-life, or portraits will look at colors to both. How we get that beautiful flow of watercolor around the page and how we can experiment with textures, textures which are unique, of course, to watercolors. And we'll look at how we can leave big areas of space, be really bold and brave. And by doing so, really enhance our focal point or enhanced elements of what we have sketched, what we have painted by the end, I hope you'll have lots of ideas to go forward and, and practice and develop your own style. Loosen up whatever you're doing and produce expressive, interesting. Thank you very much for joining me. You can find me as well on Instagram and YouTube. And please do. If you enjoyed this class, take the time to send me a message on Instagram or leave me a review on Skillshare. All these little bits of contact really mean the world to me because it's amazing to see that people are enjoying and developing from things which, which I say. 2. Supplies I'm Using: In this lesson, I just want to quickly show you a few bits and bobs I'll be using for my sketches. It's all about the loose sketching and nothing here is a must have. This is all about your style and just a few ideas to broaden your style, to listen up to. Perhaps get less on the page. And by doing so, create more. I'm using a couple of sketchbooks. The most important one for me is my mole skin sketchbook. And this is actually just one of their art range. And you can see lots of things in there already. It's A5, it's portrait because I love how that composition works when instead of a landscape sketch. And I've got a couple of crocodile clips which keep the pages open. It's not watercolor paper, It's normal cartridge paper. So you can do lots of lovely watercolors without fancy paper. I'd also just be using a very cheap sketchbook for a few little exercises along the way. For my sketching, I'll primarily be using this guy, my Lamy Safari fountain pen. I use an extra fine nib, which just produces for me a nicer quality of line. I like scratchy little lines to the big bold lines. I'll also be using a guest implement in lesson five. I won't give the, give the game away, but I'm sure you've got one, so you don't need to go and find one yet. You could use any pen, fine liner, anything with waterproof ink and ready. So you don't need to go out and buy a special fountain pen, anything like that. My watercolors are here. Tiny little palette. I love it because I carry it everywhere with me. I've got 14 colors in there and I'll list those in the project resources. Which colors I have one I use them. I'll talk you through exactly which ones I'm using. Of course, for painting, you need some brushes. So here are my size six, round and a medium-sized Chinese brush didn't really have sizes. This is about the same as a size 12 to 14. Round brush, give or take. Having a nice big brush is great for watercolor painting, especially loose painting, because we'll talk about loads of water. Big brush makes for expressive, interesting paints. Apart from that, there's really not much else. I've got a big liter of water, I've got a little towel I use to clean my brushes off. All the references I've popped up in the class resources. Like I said in the last lesson, which is all about experimenting, trying different media or just do a little demonstration sketch using not those pens and colors. So that you can see how one can approach your own style in a slightly different way and experiment in that sense, be loose in that sense. But that's everything you need. So without further ado, let's pop over and get into the first lesson. 3. The Class Project: So the project, well, of course this is a loose urban sketching class, so we can only have a loose project. And there's certainly no onus on you to go out and have to do something wide encourage you to do is go out and have a play. If you enjoyed any element of this class, then try it out. Try it, develop it, see where it takes you. And when you've done that. If you want to share in the class projects your images and your thoughts about how the process went, what you did differently and what you thought you would have done differently. If you've had another guy. Of course, if you do share something into the class projects, I will give you some feedback. It's amazing to have that sort of interaction in to see what your thoughts were about in the class as well. Anyway, without further ado, let's get to the bulk of the class where we'll have a look at the kind of sketches and fun that we can have. 4. Idea 1 - Continuous Line Drawing: So it's time now to get our sketch books out and our pens. I'm gonna be using a Lamy Safari fountain pen and a combination of just a normal bit of cartridge paper and my mole skin A5 sketchbook. And what are we doing? A bit of continuous line sketching. So in this example you can see I'm touring some fruit. Hopefully you can see that that free. What I'm doing is I'm doing it all in one line, not taking my pen off the page. And that is what continuous line sketching is. I say, Do you see what I see? Because it does make you make creative decision that makes you simplify. It makes you reduce what you see in front of you in turn, in something artistic, interesting and loose. We can do other things. Here's my little penguins. I love doing portraits like this and you can do all sorts just with these simple continuous line sketches. But what about loosening up our urban sketching? Well, let's have a look at this scene and think, how can we approach it. What I'd encourage you to do is firstly, try a couple of really simple things. Some fruit, dog, that kind of every day thing that you see. Then move on and take these same principles to architecture. Now my first step in this kind of drawing is normally to get a silhouette. So let's just watch as I grabbed those simple shapes across the top of this silhouette. Now what hopefully you've noticed is that I'm not focusing on details. There's a little bit of texture there. I've got one of the chimneys in, but not a huge amount of detail. And Tito can come later or not at all depending on how we feel and how we want to develop our sketch. Having got that silhouette, we can come back across and we can grab little details or even things like the people that people in front of the street with a continuous line drawing. What we're doing is we're tuning everything up with simplifying and we're having to make artistic decisions. And we can always come back and add more and more details. Indeed, what, what we're doing now is adding some details and we can keep going back-and-forth, adding more details underneath very simple silhouette. But we don't want to overdo it. We want to keep this as a simple, loose interpretation of a scene which we've sort of made artistic choices about. Let's have a little watch how I take some shapes and gradually build them up on the front of this church. So hopefully you can see that what I've been doing is grabbing one shape. Then within that, we can find another shape. So if we look at the top here, we've already got the silhouette and we've got the rectangles forming these restaurants or the balconies. And then we can come back and we can add all the little shapes inside they silhouettes. So we can keep going like this, adding more textures, more people, more details. But remember, this is supposed to be loose and simple. So forgive yourself. Let yourself have a few details where There's just not much there, where you've left something out, where you've edited and had a bit of fun. And always let yourself add things on top as well. Look at this little chap on top is heads clearly in front of the building. But for me, this kind of thing still works really well. There we go. That is the end of my line work for this continuous line sketch. So hopefully you've seen, It's a wonderful way of loosening, simplifying and interpreting and seen. What would be really great now is if you could have a go yourself, try the scene or try something else that you've got in mind. Of course, keep this sketch handy or one of the other ones you do. Because the next bit is really exciting all about adding flowing colors to your scenes and how lots of water can produce amazing effect. 5. Idea 2 - Let Your Colours Flow: Time to find our colors, get our palette out, and add some flowing beautiful colors to our sketch. Now before we jump into the big sketch, let's again do a little simple exercise. So here you can see a couple of patches of water. And look at those amazing patterns. If we just touch our color into there's a bit of cobalt blue. And luckily just push its way round or a patch of water. This is some indigo and see how that has a slightly different response in a different interaction. It works with all our colors. This is scarlet lake. And on top of it a bit if something go cascade green. What I find fascinating is how even just flicks of color, flicks of pigment can really create amazing effects. Effects we can purposefully produce, but can control and influence. We can experiment as well. If we create a patch of color, we can add more color within that. And notice how the blue kind of pushes the rent out the way. So not just interacting with the water or pigments will interact with each other. And we can reverse the whole process. We can add water on top of pigment, and the water will then push the pigment away. Through this, we can create all sorts of really fascinating techniques. And these techniques, these textures are totally unique to watercolor. Only with watercolor, can we get this kind of look? And that's what I love celebrating in my loose sketching. I love celebrating the unique qualities of watercolor. So how are we going to do that? Wow. Like I say, I like celebrating the unique qualities of watercolor. But I want it to be representative within the image. Not necessarily exactly the image, but taking hints from the image, but also from my Moodle high felt or what the weather was like. Perhaps even just what my favorite color was. Here. What I've done is I've filled the page with water, but I've kept me lots of it blank and we'll have a look at the importance of that in one of the next lessons all about being bold negative space. I think there's quite a nice blue sky, but there's also some glows in this image. So let's start with a cool blue, cobalt blue. And let's layer in a little bit of orange this time transparent pyrrole orange. But in the back it's quite murky. So let's see what happens if we add green, which will form a neutral brown color with all these in the mix. Then these colors will just move. They'll do their own thing. But I can push them around to create some of those lovely swells. Having seen the move for awhile, we kind of get an idea of why they've ended up. And we can then a bit more make things a bit bolder, push them out the way. I had a bit more water to create areas of light. Up at the top, I added a bit of indigo just to create a bit of drama in the sky. And then I'm going to use this same indigo in these little spots where I want some deep shadows and you can see squinting your eyes, look at the reference, you'll find the darkest areas and the lightest areas quickly emerge. And sometimes you want to show you that can create a fun idea of, you know, using our bold colors to also highlight certain areas of interest. Again, this is something you could keep going and touching and moving. And sometimes I spend half an hour doing this, sometimes I spend three or 5 min doing it. Put the idea is just to explore how that watercolor can be representative of your scene. How different splashes and splashes, how different areas of color and space can create something really beautiful, which represents the scene but isn't a tight, perfect sketch. For me, this kind of catching is really fun and really lovely. What would be correct as if you hadn't noticed, try a still life even in an apple done in slightly different colors, or perhaps take the actual urban sketch you might have tried from the last lesson. Splash some color on. Be brave with water and gentle with the pigment. And you'll find, you can very quickly create something really pretty. We'll have a little look in one of the upcoming lessons about being bold with negative space. For now, just remember, leave a bit of white. You don't want to necessarily cover the whole page. We can always come back and cover it later. But most of all have a bit of fun and let your colors painting themselves. 6. Idea 3 - Be Brave with Negative Space: So time to be brave. And what takes bravery in painting and sketching, for me is not painting or sketching an aspect of our scene, but leaving it out, being confident in our composition. So what I thought I'd do is show you this classic lighthouse scene, which is Portland had lighthouse. And show you how. Actually just sketching a few bits of it and just adding a few bits of color can make for really punchy image using similar principles to the continuous line sketching I showed you. For. I'm just grabbing the key shapes. And by grabbing these key sort of silhouette of the scene, the Cliff House, the lighthouse. And I do go back and add the lighthouse soon. We can start to get an idea of what, what's really important in this scene. So let's just watch as I grab these key shapes and then see how I start to think about the details that we might want as well. So you can see already that almost all the line work is focused on that key focal area, the house, lighthouse, and rocks just underneath it. But I wanted to go back and add just enough shape into those rocks below the cliff below. But then having done that, we can come back to the lighthouse and find those other key details. And having completed the image, in a sense, completed this sketch, we can come back again and find those key outlines. Make them bolder and boldness will bring things towards you. It makes it come out of the image, meaning that you sort of highlight it. You're highlighting whether you add color or negative space, you're highlighting, making it feel more present. Now we can start thinking about color. So negative space can be used in a couple of ways. I'm like, I'm using, I imagined hundreds of ways, but in two ways I like to think of either you can leave something blank, which will really highlight it and push it into the image. Or you can add color to something whilst everything else is blank. And that will make the color pop out. So in this image, let's add some color to our lighthouse. I started with some scarlet lake to some red to represent those roofs. Added some moon glow toward present shadow and some quinacridone gold to represent that. So light going off the Lighthouse. I then choosing just a segment of our cliffs to add a little bit of natural color is green and I know it's actually rocks, but there is green within that cliff area. So I thought, well, you know what, I'm going to use green to represent these areas. And then I'm going to match that with some nice blue C. Then we can actually already take a step back and go, You know what? Yeah, we've left a loads and loads of negative space, but do we really need anything else? Well, I thought I wanted to make this punch out a little bit more. I want that idea of a glow to really hit home. So adding more shadow and more light, then we can blend between the two and allow things to soft and, and move. And as I've said, pillow look how the amount of whitespace emphasizes the color, creates an expressive representation of our scene. And that's what we want, we want to make are not a totally figurative photo. We have the photo. We're trying to create something different. Just to enhance the shape, using some very gently mixed pigment to create little bits of shadow which don't detract from the negative space, but just add to the idea of something 3D. And again, like the end of our sketch, can now add some bold pen work around that color. I hope you can see what I mean now when I say this kind of brings things forward. So now this bold color being pushed forward by the bullpen work. And I've seen his sound suddenly so much closer to her, so much more in our face. And with this, we can create wonderful scenes rather quickly and certainly very expressively and having been very loose and made lots of decisions. I think when I talk about are, and when I say, I think that was really lovely and artistic, what I mean is someone's made laser decisions about how they want to portray the scene. And one of those big decisions is what details to add, what color to add, what not to add. This is why the negative space is such a fantastic skill to practice and learn whatever your preferred medium. Especially in watercolors, because watercolors is all about leaving that light and negative space. So have a go. I'd try this scene, try something else. Perhaps even just in your next few sketches. Just imagine what happens if I don't paint this bit, I don't sketch this bit and see where it leads you and see how it loosens up your image and lets you focus more on those parts of the image which matter more to you and matter more to the viewer as well. 7. Idea 4 - Limited Palette (and Interior Sketching): So we've done lined, we've done color, we've done limiting way you color. So if we limit the number of colors we use, how does that impact our sketching? In this, I also wanted to just sort of talk about the fact that urban sketching doesn't have to just be architecture. In fact, urban sketching is, is more about sketching the environments around us, around people. That's often architecture, but includes people. It includes cafes, food, still lives. And the classic one is of course, to sketch your, you'll breakfast or your branch in a cafe. So here's my little crunch, a croissant, and of course, a coffee. We can do these still lives and things in the same principles of loose sketching, the same ideas of grabbing little shapes of joining things up and simplifying. I'm just going to move around the scene a little bit, adding a few extra details here. And now, unlike some fruit, got an apple or banana. So let's just watch and see how these same continuous line principles that we were using before can come into play in a still life. Now this is a really key principle. If you look at this scene, you will see all sort of just floating in the air, isn't it? Now, in architectural scenes, landscapes, we naturally have a horizon line of some kind or a grounding line be that the sun, the sky meets the land or the bottom of a building. In a still life, we don't necessarily just automatically have that, so we need to make sure we add it in. And that could just be a line, a horizontal line going cross the Blackboard page. Or it can be finding the edge of the table, finding the edge of the room. And you see how just by getting those simple shapes and suddenly this whole array of things as landed on a table. Just a really important principle to bear in mind. On the same note, just having a little suggestion of a background can be quite important to setting the scene of the scene. So here just suggesting a little window in the background. Again, this is really nice way of being loose. Now, how we can do these colors, I'm just going to use my scarlet lake. A nice primary red and cobalt blue are very nice. Primary blue for a contrasting colors, of course as well. And I specifically chose a nice colors because neither of them bet any relevance to the scene, to the cross on the banana, the coffee. They're not blue, they're not bright red. But we can still use these two colors and we can interchange them to pull different objects apart. So a croissant read a phonon, cup of coffee obliques, and now they're very separate objects and they're also because we've chosen where to put the color. We sort of push them towards us. We've made it a feature of the much like we were discussing in the negative space exercise. We can also mix the colors and create something more neutral. And use that as a shadow or dark color. And thus we get our coffee and we get this little starts of shadows under and behind the little shadows on the croissant, e.g. notice how the layering, building up these shadows is what makes things feel real. The actual color isn't important, but the feeling of free D is, and that's where just being a little inventive with your colors, being loose with the choice of colors, but more smart with how you apply those colors is important. And just moving around gradually, little by little. You'll notice this time I'm using a much smaller brush. So before I've been using rather large that a Chinese-style brush, It's probably about a size 14 round, give or take versus this which is a size six round brush. And that lets me be really careful with where I'm popping my color. And that's where we can start layering and bring, bringing out shapes. But still being least, because we are still choosing where to put the color, we're still using non representative colors. We still got this fascinating image where we've made lots and lots of fun decisions and created a piece of art rather than a photo, rather than something literal of the scene in front of us. As before, celebrating watercolors, what they are, a few splashes can really lift the image and it kind of implies you haven't left it blank in a sense. You, you now have the splashes in the windows which are just suggesting enough color that it fills the image. And means we don't have to paint everything. We don't have to fill the page with paint. We can just make choices about where we use are very, very limited palette. And there you go. This is another little sketch done. I hope you enjoy the sort of the double lesson away, isn't it about the importance of using still lives and horizon lines to ground things. And the fact that still lives is still just shapes. They're still the same, really. Just the shapes of representing something different. Similarly, we could take a scene outside and just use two colors. And you could use to random colors or you could use a bit of color theory. I've made it simple here and chosen two primary colors, which are always going to work quite well together because they're always going to still mix into another favorite color. Another interesting idea to try to use a primary color and it's opposing secondary color, e.g. blue is opposite. Orange. What that means is that if you mix the two colors together, you'll get something every great. So you've got very good shadow. And how do you know which colors are opposite? Well, there's two ways. One, you can buy a color wheel if you like. Or a primary color will always be opposite. The secondary color, which is a mix of the other two primary colors. So orange is red and yellow, so it's opposite blue. If you mix red and blue, you've got purple, which must be opposite yellow. So you can work it out. Well, you can Google it, or you can just have a little play yourself and explore how your colors work. 8. Idea 5 - Switch Up Your Supplies: So now I'm going to say, why not try something totally different? Okay, then. So as you can see, I've decided to choose a pirate, not just going to use a buyer. I'm mostly going to use some marker pens, which is very different to mine, normal style. But that's really fun. It makes you learn things and how would I suggest using that? A thumbnail sketch. Thumbnail sketches, just a small sketch on your page where you don't have to feel that you have totally committed. You don't feel like you're going to waste hours and produce something you really don't like and didn't enjoy. Because all you've committed to is this loose sketch on a page that in itself can be a work of art. In fact, around my room, I have lots of sketchbooks with thumbnail sketches hung in, in nice frames because they can be amazing. They can be really wonderful. So how are we going to do this one? Well, I've got my little thumbnail sketch, I've got my reference. And again, all the references are in the class resources. I started exploring the tree. And the buyer is very different. For my normal fountain pen marks, it's making a very different. You'll notice just now broken out with that thumbnail frame and that's okay. In fact, you don't have to stick within the thumbnail. You can have fun. You can break outside and produces really interesting composition which you'll see especially when we go and add some color to this. As I was saying, the marks and producing with a pirate very different. So the feeling I have an enduring with it, feel much more involved with the page is much more scratchy and tactile. My fountain pens are lovely and smooth, which creates beautiful lines, beautiful quality of line very easily creates a nice, solid, dark line. Now with the pyro, it's much more scratchy, but I can feel my way pushing across the page. And it much easier to make sharp geometric lines, which led to me having fun with that tree, e.g. and the same with my people are a bit more angular. Normal nuts just come about because the pyro feels different. And have a go and just have a play with different things. If it wasn't a pyro that I was using, perhaps I could really use a pencil or watercolor pencil or Use the DP pan or used it really bold fountain pen loads and loads of options of ways you could sketch and draw. And paint, of course, oriented color. So continuing to just move around the scene and just find different ways of using the panas is nothing crazy, but even small things feel different. So even the hatching feels very different. It feels much more subtle because the lines are more sort of gray and loose. My fountain pen. So it's just finding that she, the, the amount of shadows producing was less, but the amount of texture and the pace would have felt, felt more somehow. Now in a normal way, I love sketching, so moving back into my shapes and I've got on the page and I'm now adding some boldness or adding specific details. Again, each of these details is an opportunity to just discover something different about your experiment, about the different implement you're using and how it interacts. You can, you can increasingly see I think that these funny shaped, so much more scratchy, much geometric even than my normal sketching style. And I think that that's something I've found with a buyer and I was very, very happy with the sketch. I think it's really nice. Now the next state, so here's my little pot of Pitt Artist Pen. They've got an awesome boldly colored India ink. So basically marker pens, but they're also waterproof. I have them for sometimes adding on top of my watercolors, e.g. but if I rarely just sketch with them. So let's try something different, something I can't achieve with my watercolors. Here, I'm just going for a really flat sky. And initially my head this we can make beautiful perfectly flat sky. Then I discovered that as you cover over, Can you see you actually get a little texture, a lot of layering of the colors. So had to go back and forward and add a bit more layering here and there. But also had to accept some of that texture. Normally I love texture and actually quite like this texture. But it wasn't expected. It was something I had to work with them. I got me thinking about, um, about how maybe I could produce something like this with some watercolors underneath. So again, an opportunity to experiment and explore, just because we've decided to do a little sketch with different pens. So this just want a nice pop of a nice orangey red. And here I'm just doing what I might normally to eat, but using a different medium, going round, picking out some highlights, creating a little bit of structure with my little color as well as really pushing out some other areas. Going back to the sky, just trying to neaten things up. And as I added in these little pits and thought about it, I thought, Yeah, let's see if I can just use this blue elsewhere as well. See what happens if I just touch it around the image. Does that help? Does it not? Then I've got one more color than I thought it'd be good just to to try and look for something a bit more neutral, bit darker. This is sort of on Monday, on Monday brown, just to create that shadow. Because talking earlier about how the shadows went as dark as I expected from my normal hatching. I would get a much darker shadow I feel. But this time I didn't. So just going back and trying something different, exploring, experimenting. And despite how everything's different, Everything's still sort of the same. It's still, to me very much looks like my sketch and I'm still doing the same kind of process is going back with that pen at the end, neaten things up and grab shapes. So I'm thinking lose something experimental, but I'm still paying me. And that's what I'd encourage you guys to have a go at doing. You don't need to copy someone's style, although that in itself can be an interesting learning experience and it can lead you to developing your own style by finding bits that you like from other people. But what you can do certainly is take your style and push it, stretch it by trying something different. Perhaps you'll do something in series, may just pick up a bio, the most common pen that you may not actually have tried sketching within the past. But maybe you do something even more out that you'll pick up some oils and see what happens. And pick up some sponges and paint. A big acrylic painting just using sponges instead of brushes. These kind of things can lead to sort of, let's call them creative revelations. But they can be really fun. They can be really enjoyable and really change how you perceive yourself and your art processes going forward. 9. Thanks!: So you made it. Thank you very much for joining me in my whole class. I hope you had some fun. I hope more than anything that's giving you a bit of inspiration to go out and try some things out. I'd love to hear from you what you thought of this class. Leaving a review on Skillshare is hugely valuable to me both in terms of getting more people to see my class, but also because it's really great to know that people have seen the class, enjoyed it. And I want to tell other people about it. I also love hearing from you on Instagram and YouTube, but I have loads of other tutorials and things going on, releasing videos regularly there. So if you want to connect, please just do. But most of all, I hope you enjoyed the class. I hope you're enjoying your sketching. I hope you can go have a bit of fun doing some loose, expressive urban sketching.