Urban Sketching - Bold House Portraits in Two Point Perspective

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi there. Are you an urban sketcher looking to get into home and house portraits but not sure where to go? Perhaps you find those details, the windows too challenging or you never get the textures of the wall right and the colors just don't seem to work together. If that sounds like you, then this may well be the class you're looking for. My name is Toby, known as Toby Urbansketch on Instagram, YouTube, and of course on Skillshare. I'm an ink and watercolor urban sketcher. One of the fundamentals, the bread and butter of urban sketching is house portraits and neighborhood sketches. Over the years, I've produced lots of house sketches, both as commissions but also as unique gifts for loved ones, for people getting married, moving into their first house, or even just inundating my mum with loads of birthday presents, sketching her house. In this class, I want to show you everything I've learned during this time. Houses are filled with different details and there's lots of challenges which we might perceive. But actually, with a little bit of practice and a few tips and tricks, it becomes rather easy. We'll look at perspective, for example, do you sketch the house straight on or do you put it at an angle? How does that change things like our vanishing points? Well, don't worry, we'll talk about all of that and we'll work through an example as well. Next, we'll have a general look at textures and think about how we use our pen just to get enough detail not to overwhelm the page but to really elegantly and simply show the viewer exactly what we mean to show them. Using these principles we'll then look at some specific details. Windows, doors, roofs, walls, you name it. We do it both looking at pen, but also how we add colors. I'll give you my top tip on how to use just two colors to paint any wall or roof and make it very interesting without worrying about the specific details. Next up, the class project. Now, I've provided you a reference from my hometown. It's a beautiful house with a classic red brick wall with some interesting shadows on it. You're welcome to use this. Or of course, I'd also be delighted if you wanted to sketch your house or use this class as an opportunity to produce one of those unique gifts for a loved one. If you enjoy the lesson, please do leave me a review. It means the world. I also love hearing from you outside of Skillshare. Follow me here, follow me on YouTube, find me on Instagram, send me a message and tag me in your images if you produce them and want to share them. Most of all though, have fun, enjoy the lesson, and happy sketching. [MUSIC] 2. Supplies: The equipment, the supplies I'm using and definitely not rules, but just guidelines for what you might want to use yourself. I'm going to split it into implement, paper, and colors, add in the couple of little extra things that sometimes we forget. So the implement, and this is everything. I've got a mechanical pencil, this is no 0.5 mm by Faber Castile. Of course, any pencil will do probably for Beale or darker, so that you can just be really light and gentle with your lines. A rubber is important because it lets you remove some of those darker lines when you go and do your watercolors. My pen is a laminar all-star panel. I sketch with this often, also a laminar all-star. I've got some ink and I cooled a Platinum Carbon Black Ink, that's waterproof. Being waterproof is important. But the type of pen isn't. You could use a fine liner and loads of brands make waterproof fine liner, and even some binaries are waterproof, and I'm more than adequate. I know that people have produced sketches for this class using borrow. Next my brushes. I'm just using a Size 6 round brush and a Size 2 quill brush. You could use a Size 10 round brush instead of this. I just like the slightly different shape, carries a different amount of water, which uses a slightly different effect on the page. When it comes to colors, I'm using my same word color palette that I always use, it's got 14 colors inside. We're not going to be using all of them. In case you're interested, the colors I will be using are just working from the bottom. Some quinacridone, gold, some Hansa yellow medium. I'll use some scarlet lake and some cobalt blue. Then up here, I'll use some moon glow. In one of the exercises, I'll demonstrate a couple of these darker colors, perylene, violet, and indigo. I'll be using a lot of quinacridone sienna. In the project resources I'll list all of these colors, but I'll also list the important ones and the alternatives because you definitely don't need to go out and bind these colors exactly. Lastly, the paper. For my final project, I'm using this, this is just a simple student grade part of A4 watercolor paper. It's nothing special, it's cold pressed, it's got a nice texture to it, and it's cheap, and it's fun. For the rest of the exercises, including the watercolor exercises, I'm using this pad. This is an own brand, just bog standard, really cheap. I'm sketching part with some cartridge paper, and more than adequate for exploring colors, for exploring pen work and having fun again. Let's not forget those last bits. I've got a really big jug of water. I use a liter jug and that's because it produces more interesting effects, it keeps your colors clearer, and I like very watery watercolors. I've also got some masking tape, which creates a nice frame when you do your painting. Lastly, I've got a towel which I've been using for years instead of kitchen paper. But you could use kitchen paper instead if you wanted. 3. The Class Project: The final project will be a house portrait. Before we get there, I'm going to take you through some specifics about perspective and that helps us to get our composition right. Then we'll be looking at details like how to sketch and color windows, doors, roofs, all of these bits will feature, of course, in our chosen final project. What I'd love for you to do is either use my reference photo or sketch your own house or a loved one's house. Maybe you want to take this opportunity to create a beautiful gift for a loved one and give them a Christmas or house-warming present over a sketch of their house made by you. If you are up to it, it'd be amazing to share that in the class resources as well. It's a wonderful opportunity to get feedback to see other people's work. But most importantly, when you are doing the project, don't worry, don't rush, take it step by step. We'll be doing first to pencil sketch, then a pen sketch, then we're adding on colors and then we'll be doing these finished touches. All of these bits we've already practiced in the lessons before so you know you can do it, and you know if you work through it step by step it's going to come together and it's going to look great. 4. Perspective in Sketching: The first thing we're going to look at here is perspective, and perspective is important because it's how we think about our composition. I'm going to take you for a little walk around my neighborhood. We'll look at some examples of house from different perspectives and then we will do a little work example to show how having no perspective or having two-point perspective might change our scene and how we might work that in to our final project. The first thing we're going to try and think about is perspective. Perspective is a scary word and it's something which we try and avoid thinking about and then get frustrated that we can't quite get right. I suppose the first thing is what is perspective? Perspective is how we show objects which are 3D and represent them on a 2D piece of paper. If we look at this house, this photo is already a 2D representation of something that is 3D, and that's what we want to transmit onto our page. When we're walking around, when we're outside, things are more complicated and the positions, the angles are always changing. We might go from a really nice view, really interesting feel, less nice, less attractive to you, or something which just doesn't feel as good, and often perspective is part of what's manipulating that image in our head to feel interesting or not. What tips and tricks do you need for perspective, for home portraits, for house sketching? Well, I think that there are two ways in which we most typically will approach a house and sketch it. That's either with no perspective like in this photo or in two-point perspective like in this photo. What do they mean? Well, if we overlay our no-point perspective with some lines, we can see that all of our horizontal lines are strictly horizontal there, they're flat, while our vertical lines are flat as well. There are no vanishing points. These lines are not meeting off anywhere, they're always going to be flat lines. What's the vanishing point? Well, if we look at our two-point perspective reference, we put some lines over it. We trace our horizontal lines. We find they meet at two points. They meet at two points on what's known as the horizon line. What's the horizon line? Horizon line is our eye level. If we draw our verticals, we find they're all vertical. There's no other vanishing points, there's just these two vanishing points. That's what we mean by two-point perspective. Classically, two-point perspective is when you're looking at a street corner or you're looking at a square or rectangular cube, rather a 3D cube from an angle. Whereas no-point perspective is typically when you're doing that shop front sketch when you're looking at something straight on. In practice, how can we put this down on our page? Well, let's just do a couple of little thumbnail sketches here in a sketchbook. If we were to do a no-point perspective, I'm very roughly use one of our no-point perspective reference photos as an idea of what we're doing. What you could do is you could draw out a grid and then you can draw the verticals. You can imagine these lines are just any width apart but always being parallel. Then you're going to be able to fit your house or whatever you're sketching along or parallel to these lines so your house will fit like this. The roof angles are going to be angled, but the roof itself is going to be parallel, then everything within that is going to fit as well. These windows are parallel, the door is parallel. Everything has these neat 90-degree angles which fits. What about with our two-point perspective? Well, again, that's roughly take this idea of a house, we'll fit it into a thumbnail. Now the first thing we need to do is find a horizon line because of horizon line is the one horizontal line which is flat. Every line below that will be angling more and more down, and every line above it angling more and more up. When we know the angles, we can find the angles by looking at our reference photo. We know the angles of these lines, we can find where they meet. So we might finally meet here and here we get vanishing points like so. Then we can draw out these construction lines again. We'll find, if we draw the middle of a house here, we'll find that we can meet all of these construction lines like so. Apologies for my slightly wobbly lines there. Then all the vertical lines are going to meet up here, they're going to be parallel, but they're all going to meet on the same perspective line. This line will take all verticals and all of this is actually at the same height. Within this, you then going to have windows which will have the vertical lines going straight for all the horizontal lines following these different lines of perspective. As such, you can again construct. If we draw our same door, you'll be able to construct it. This horizon line is at eye level like I said. If we were to add a person in, their head would be their body and legs. Also, we know that the door's going to finish slightly above the horizon line and many of the windows as well will be a little bit above and then coming to below. The bottom is going to have to angle down and the top is going to have to angle up. That is how you can use two-point perspective or no-point perspective to construct your sketch and to make it feel 3D. Above this, of course, you're going to have the roof line. These angles are going to be different, but then the top will still follow these points of perspective. We're still going to be following our lines of perspective which all meet down at these vanishing points. That's what we mean by no-point or two-point perspective. No-point perspective lovely for very detailed sketches where we might be trying to bring out all the details in the brickwork or lots of things going on in the windows. Two-point perspective, very good for a sense of drama. Do you feel how this so 3D into the looming over us and it gives us a real sense of drama and interest? For me, I often prefer perspective sketches, but that's mostly what we'll be focusing on today in our final project. But there's a very strong argument that house portraits look extremely lovely like this as well. 5. Make Textures Effective: This lesson is all about textures, and it's just a very quick overview. I want to show you that less is often more that really effective textures when we sketch, are actually produced by well-chosen, well-planned out, marked not by a flurry of furious, overworked pen marks. Let's have a look at this example and I'll talk you through what I'm doing and what I think the best way to avoid a common mistake in getting your textures down. Textures are our roots, are our walls or even a windows, those grasses outside. We're going to be looking at each of those different details in turn in the next few lessons. But I just wanted to give you an overview of my biggest lesson about textures. I'm talking about ink textures here. What I see, especially in the beginning sketches in people just setting out is a real temptation to say we see a wall. But it could be anything, could be any textured surface and they see a textured surface. Then we think, well, the only way that we can get this in and do it justice. Is if we draw every little brick. But of course, not only does that take forever, by the time we're done, it looks messy and overcrowded and not very pleasant. Now I'm not saying this is 100 percent the wrong thing to do. I'm just saying it's very time-consuming, very hard to get right. It's definitely got to wait. This is always going to be quite an overbearing amount of ink to bring into a scene. To sketch the rest of the scene, you also can ask you an awful lot of inkwork to make it feel balanced. What do I think the most effective way of sketching a wonderful texture? It's with suggestions. The suggestion start from that first line. You see see here we've got a really hard outline, but a textured surface. Why don't we make that outline texted as well? We're already thinking about what is making up this texture. In this texture is those bricks. Underneath perhaps we already decided, look, we know there's some grass, they were already being that grass texture in. We get to the top and we think, well actually the top, perhaps there's a guttering, has got a hard line. It's a smooth and hard line, but in the middle, there's a little bump where the guttering joins together. Already, I think we've suggested a lot of texture. This wall already looks more interesting than when we first drew a square. It's certainly, for me it looks more effective than this. To get a bit more in, we can just start connecting a couple of these lines. We can bring in those brick-like marks. For all we're doing is little suggestions, maybe a couple of full bricks here and there. But I would ask, which one looks better? The one we spent so long, I had to speed up the video. The one which is a really hard bold line or the one where we just fold about it a little bit, loosened ourselves up, and had a lovely little sketch with some loose textures. This is the principle, I think is most important with how sketches and things like this, when we're trying to get the feel of a building. Don't sketch the whole thing, Find what's important and sketch that in a loose, but interesting in every way. 6. Windows - My Top Tips: The next bit we're going to look at are windows. Windows is very challenging. They're so key to a house. They got lovely reflections. They've got all shapes and colors and it can be difficult to get them feeling real. Well, the trick that you'll learn soon is to treat them as a 3D object. They're not flat. They're 3D. Let's have a look at this and we'll see how we add our colors and our lines, thinking of them as a 3D object. Windows and doors. Now of course these things are very important potentially when the harder features to feel like we've mastered. Windows come in all varieties, but they all have some simple features in common that we can use to generalize and to capture effective windows, no matter their shape, size, look in our scene. We're going to have a think both about the sketch and about the colors in this. First, the sketch, the ink outline. Well, if we make some reasonably large windows on this page, one thing is to start nice and loose. It's tempting to draw the window and then come across and immediately draw the frame. But why doesn't this look right? The reason it doesn't look right is because it's not 3D and windows are most certainly 3D. They have shape. If this is an upstairs window, we're looking from down here, we're looking upwards at it. What does that shape mean? What does it mean we can see. Well, it means we can see the underneath of this window. It means we can see the underneath of this frame. We're standing slightly to the right, so we'll be able to see the side here, and the side here, and we'll be able to see the side here and the side here, and also type it underneath there. But the frames also have a front, so we also have an outer edge to our frame. Now, for every one line we first drew, we've drawn at least one lawn in some places when we're thinking about the perspective, the angle that we're looking at. We're drawing another. Now, we're building up that shape, the real shape of a window. What else do windows have? Well, they have a surround, don't they? When we think about the textures, we could even have been bringing texture into this line, but certainly, we can make sure we contrast our window seal with a few of what will be surrounding bricks in a typical house in the UK, but it might be woodwork. It might be something else. Just by making sure we treat windows as a 3D object, we can get very effective windows. It doesn't matter the size or the shape or whatever. If we do this quickly again and we think about it as a three-step process this time, so what I'd suggest you get your outline. Again, we're thinking already about the texture of the surrounding wall. This is going to be a nice circular window. We've already got our outer frame in and we've thought about the texture that's surrounding it, some bricks. It's not the same thing as what the window is made of. Then we think about the inner frame. This is going to be a slightly smoother line and it's going to capture the big elements of the frame. In this case, maybe we've got two windows divided like that. That's Step 2. Then we think about the smaller elements in the perspective. Where are we looking at this from? If we're looking from below and maybe this time we're looking from the left, we're going to be drawing the inner side to the frame where we can see them which you're going to be down the size, and at the top. Now, we have a 3D window and it's part of its external surroundings. Often windows will have a nice good feature brickwork or perhaps we could even do that here. They might have some featured brickwork above and that can be really nice to consider as part of your window. They might have little internal windows as well. Often they're best done. There's a really gentle couple of lines just loosely marking in the key lines, but that's my tips, my three steps for getting your windows and fundamentally treating them as a 3D object. Now, color. What's important about color? Well, windows don't have a color, do they? The frames might, but the windows don't have a color. What they have are reflections. On a bright sunny day, the reflection might be a couple of things. Most often it might be a nice bright blue. Whatever blue you're using and popping that in at the top of the windows is a really lovely way of showing that reflection. Now, again, if we're looking up, we have to think about how the light is reflecting. The higher the window, the more it will be reflecting the sky, and whatever color the sky is, that might be a golden light. It might be a murky cloud or something. As we come down, it's reflecting whatever is behind us. It's often effective to apply some shadow in the lower part of the window. Then we can come down and we can apply a nice shadow color to mingle with that blue and to give that effective idea of light reflection. Again, perspective because it's showing our viewpoint. It's showing what the perspective of the viewer is. You might also have stuff behind the window, or you might have more complex reflections or lines or light and you can get those in, but you just have to be gradual with the process. An example of something behind the window which is really lovely to grab is often if there's a glow, so if it's a nighttime scene or even just during the day or the bright light on. How can we do that? Well, that glow is often at the top of the window because the glow is coming from a light on the ceiling. Let's pop some yellow in there. Let's say that it's a reasonably bright day, so actually there is some blue in the sky. We can pop a bit of blue in as well. Then remember our rules about reflections. It's probably going to be darker as we come down because it could be reflecting more of the street and just general murkiness behind us and there we go. We end up with this glowing light coming through. How did that work? Well, it worked because we were sketching quite quickly and we kept everything wet. These colors can blend and move together and that blending is what provides such an effective glowing shape. I also think last little bit on this lesson that it's worth having a think with your windows about whether there's a shadow under the frame and often having these shadows just accentuates the idea that this is 3D. This isn't just a flat object. This is now casting a shadow. There's my little lesson on windows, color, and line work. Three steps to finding your window shape. Remember to treat it as a 3D object and just take it gently and consider the textures. 7. Doors - My Top Tips: Now that we've done windows, doors are really simple. They're like a window but without the reflections. I'm just going to show you really quickly how I ink my doors and then we'll move on after that to the next lesson. Now, doors we can talk about very quickly as well, but they're basically the same. The difference is they have less window, less reflection. We can just do the same process of get the outside line and then find the inside of the frame and consider your viewpoint. If we're off to the right, we'll just see the inside like this. We're going to see much on this side at all. Then you've got your little door furniture and accouterments. Maybe a little mouth as well. You might have a couple of small windows inside. The challenging bit is often a doorstop or this step. I'd encourage you not to get too stuck on that, but just treat it again as a simple shape; a series of lines which stack up and show you the shape of your door. It's as simple as that. It's exactly the same as a window really. It's just got less reflection to think about. Instead, we think more about what's the color of the door. How do we get the color of the door interesting and accurate? 8. Walls and Roofs - My Top Tips: Now, walls and roofs. These are obviously a key, they make up a house, don't they? But they're also so key in the atmosphere of the house going from a red brick to a sun stain to a wooden wall, or a hay roof or a modern slate roof really changes the feel of the house. We're going to be thinking a lot about those textures as we're doing these sketches, but we're also going to cover colors. I've got my top tip coming up on how to apply colors to walls and roofs to make it easy to create those beautiful, varied, and interesting tones. What we're going to do, a couple of simple sketches, added a little bit of color, and we'll talk through the principles and remember that texture lesson as well. If we do a nice red brick house first, just remember, think about that texture as you're drawing. Red bricks are quite neat, isn't it? These sidewalls there, they've got a little bit of wobble to them, but they are not hugely wobbly. Then we come along, we pop quite a neat line across because a red brick house normally has a fairly modern gutter. We already just think about all these textures. Then these bricks that we're going to bring in, well, they're quite small and orderly, so just a few little flicks and hatches like this. Sometimes just putting a couple of bricks next to each other and little grips just gets that idea of texture across far more effectively. There you go, a simple red brick wall. I'd like to put more bricks at the sides and at transition points. Things are changing. Then I do in the middle, and you might normally have some windows and things in there as well. Next, let's try a different type of brick, that big sandstone brick which you might get in churches or grand old buildings. This time, we're thinking about having big steps and probably an older roof. Again, the top is going to be wobbly. These bricks can be bigger. They're going to be varied in size. There's going to be some dark shadows in a few places that are a bit more random as well, aren't they? But just by being nice and loose with our lines, we can quickly create that feel. Now lastly, let's think of a Nordic hut. We've got straight wooden walls, but very wobbly, difficult to see bottom, perhaps lots of grass or perhaps the wood's a little bit mottle at this stage and the same at the top, it might be a little bit mottled. Then going up, we've got these slats and some of them we'll see all the way down. Some of them we'll only see a little bit of. We're just producing these vertical textures going up and down, and keep it varied, keep it so changing up, don't overdo it, don't make it too patterned. Before you know it, you'll have a lovely textured wall. That's all we need to do to grab our textures. Now let's just think about our roofs next as we move on, then we'll do the colors after. Let's put our red brick house on a nice tiled roofs. These tiles are very small little shapes. We bring the tiles across, give it a nice ridge line, and then the same idea in these tiles, just they'll, flicks across. We're creating these little shapes, suggestions of tiles. Perhaps this building has gotten more rickety old reef bigger tiles. A nice way of portraying a rickety roof is just accentuating and they'd lean in their roof and a dip. Again, just bigger tiles. There we go, we've now got that very different feel. Now maybe this roof is rarely falling apart. Maybe it's made of straw or something very loose, so it could be an old barn. It's a real loopy and up-and-down roof and big dip. We can just put these very loose textures in. Now it really feels like it's falling apart, doesn't it? It's really coming apart at the seams. Now an important note about textures, if we just move over here briefly. If we are drawing on a two-point perspective, the vertical lines of all these bricks they're going to still be vertical. But all these horizontal lines are going to be following our lines of perspective, so these bricks are going to be following these lines. If we draw the bricks here slipping out to bricks at the top, a sloping down. But there you go. Really simple to just get those brick textures. They've put textures into your walls. Next, let's do a bit of colors. Now I've got a really simple tip for coloring walls. I argue, you don't need to get it exactly right, and the wolves themselves, they wouldn't have one color. They'll have lots of different colors. I'm looking at my neighbor's house now through the window and I can see his red brick. Some of them are almost blue, some of them are very pale. Take two complimentary colors, and what are complimentary colors? Well, for example, a red and a warm brown. They're very similar. They compliment each other. Compare that to a red and if we put a blue there, these are almost opposite. They don't complement, they're very nice together, but they're contrasting. What are we going to do with our two complementary colors? Well, these two complimentary colors are going to be closest to the color of our brick. Here we've got red bricks. We put in some red, and we'll move that red around a bit. Then underneath or around, we'll put in some of our warm brown. Now we can move that around. We can add a bit more red if we want, we can add a bit more of our brown. Now we've got this varied wash. Just like all the bricks are varied, we've got a lovely varied wash. We can repeat the same thing over here. Let's make the sandstone bricks a mix of yellow and gold. That's not enough gold, is it? Anyway here's some gold. Again, these colors compliment and then that variation is just beautiful and it's really not hard work. Perhaps over here we've got some more muddy colors. We'll take a moon glow, which is a very dark color. Then we'll choose, let's use some a purple Perylene violet, I suppose it's a violet, isn't it? Again, we just vary that wash, and that implies all that variation in tone that we know is there. The roof is no different. A couple of colors. Let's take indigo here. I'm going to pair it with a moon glow. We get this lovely varied wash, which really punches through everything. We could repeat that with all of our buildings. Now another key point now is shadows, so shadows in our buildings. How can we do that? Well, two ways. Number 1, we can take our color and we can apply it in another layer. When it's all most dry, we can apply these thicker tones of color. Then that will form a shadow. We can use these same colors to also add little brick marks and that enhances the texture. It's this thing that I'll be doing in the final part of my final project. But what else can we do? We can use a shadow color, so a moon glow, an indigo, or Payne's gray, and we can bring that across instead. That creates a different shadow. Perhaps more contrast in shadow, which might be what you want, but it might be too harsh, it might not be exactly what you're looking for. This is important. Again, if we come over to our two-point perspective it's important because we're going to have one wall probably in a bit of light. Maybe that's this wall in light. Then we're going to have another wall which is in shadow and what we want, we still want that color, so we still got that red, but we need a way of pulling them apart. That might be, even when it's wet, I can drop in some shadow. Now we've got a really dark obvious shadow. Or if you wanted it more subtle, we could use this method. And it's also okay to mix and match. If I just drop some of our shadow color in this wall, it's still going to look lovely. Last little bits you can do little splashes if you like, a bit of randomness to produce that interesting texture but you don't need to do that. There is my simple processes for grabbing those textures of the wall, so grabbing those shadows and getting really interesting walls without painting every tiny detail. 9. Trees and Gardens - My Top Tips: Now we're doing house portraits, and houses often have gardens or trees or bushes. I've a really simple way that I like producing these on the page, as well as a simple way of coloring them. That's what this lesson is all about, and what I'm going to show you now. We're onto our last lesson about those little details. This one is those greeneries. I've got one really lovely way for bringing out textures and beautiful trees and bushes and grass. I think this one way is enough certainly to get started and it's all you might ever want to use. What is that way? Well, if we just do the sign of our house here, we can use that as a way of opening up where our tree might go. Now from my tree, what I like doing is pulling out leaf-like shapes and creating an outline of these random shapes. But trying to stick to vaguely, at least based on what the shape of the actual tree or object I'm looking at is. Where there's a bit more shadow at the bottom, we do few more of these little leaf shapes. Then we just complete that tree. We can also add in a few bits in the middle. Again, just picking out where we are seeing shadows. Are we seeing that little clumps of leaves at the bottom? All we need is a really simple trunk. We can add Endo, side branches, and we can give that trunk bit of texture. Remembering again that less is often more. It works or bushes as well. We just come and we find this little leaf shapes and before you know it, you can build up a lovely hetero. At the bottom. You might want to get a different texture in the idea of where it's meeting the ground. Then again in the middle, you pick out these little shapes of different greens and bits and bobs going up and down. That's all the line work that I think is needed when you're focusing on your urban sketch of a house or a home. Put a bit of colors, obviously lovely. Similarly to when we talked about wolves, it's all about just keeping a varied wash. I'm taking care here, what's called a cascade green or dark green. Then on that, I could put some yellow. That way we never need more than a couple of colors. Already, do you see how that little variation in the wash just produces light and shape? Do the same with our bush here. Start off with one color and then come in with that yellow, sorry. You've got that lovely variation. Light with wolves as well. A few splashes can just bring that area to life. If you want to bring out a garden, you can mark out with pen or you can just leave it as is gentle flowing and again, Fareed wash of greens, different greens or greens, and yellows. Perhaps there's a few beautiful flowers and things going on. Well, again, no problem. You just add this little punches of color. They could go anywhere. If you want to, you could get that neater effect by marking out individual flowers. You could, within your grasp, we've done little flowers and you leave those flowers blank. Then when you come back, we have to do as of course, grab a little bit of color and fill them up. Now you've got these beautiful flowers sticking out of your scene as well. Equally doing a few little splashes of that color can be another effective way of showing off the natural beauty of flowers without having to over-sketch them and overdo them. 10. Skies - In Two Ways: Now, no house is complete without a sky. Well, actually sometimes they are, so there is always the option to leave the sky blank. But I like coloring the sky and I'm going to show you my two most commonly used method for coloring the sky, which will help you choose between that beautiful blue sky or there's more moody, dramatic skies when you do your final project. Now, if you're doing a sky, I'd suggest popping a little bit of water in the page first and getting that water fairly neatly doesn't have to be perfect, but fairly neatly up to the edge of your house. Then what you can do, you can bring in for a blue bright sky. You can bring in your blue and look at how it just paints itself. Now that that pigment is doing what it wants, we can have a play. We can do some splashes. We can draw off our brush and we can move the pigment around. We can add more pigment and push the pigment in and develop interesting shapes. You can fill the whole sky with color if you want. I find it more effective. If we have this sky pointing towards our focal point, pointing down towards that house and leaving it nice and crisp edge. I'm not always, but normally do this guy first because that also means if you go over a bit, you can correct it. You can come back with some of the other colors you're going to add and you can correct that slight misstep. Of course, loosen watery colors is also really fun and that's what I'm normally all about. Having these colors pool over, perhaps pooling into some of the trees and things. I also think it's a wonderful idea. What's the other sky? Well, for more dramatic sky and more something else going on, stormy sky, I suggest again a bit of water and then choosing a shadowy color, like a moon glow, Payne's gray a dark blue, perhaps an indigo. This is moon glow and we do the same thing and it paints itself. We do some splashes and you could leave it at that and we've got this lovely, definitely moody sky. But you can go further. You can start having a play. You could put some little blue end. Something that blue brightens it up, it's now feeling like perhaps the Sun's coming out behind this cloud. You could do something else. You could pop a little bit of red in and you could have a fun making some shapes in the sky and letting the water color just create something really interesting. That's it. That's literally all it takes to create interesting skies a little bit of water, a little bit of pigment, and a little bit of plane. That's our last little lesson on the different aspects of our home and house portrait in an urban sketching style and we can move on to our project. 11. Step 1 - Pencil Sketching: Now we're onto the final project and this is Step 1, getting our first sketch down. I'll switch this into two. We're going to start with a pencil sketch where we're sketching nice and lightly getting these big shapes. Not worrying too much about texture, but getting the perspective right, going back to that lesson before and just getting the feel of our sketch right, trying to start to understand what our composition is going to be. The first step is getting a little bit of a sketch on our paper, getting our composition right, getting a feel for the rest of the image. What we want to do here, you've got these textures and get our shape and our perspective on this page. Now, you'll notice this reference photo. It's got two-point perspective but it's very angled and it's not on the corner. The reason is normally you're trying to focus on the house. That tiny bit of perspective, all that's quite awkward to draw sometimes adds a lot of drama for me and that's why I like doing it in this style. What I'm going to do, I'm going to use a pencil just so I can get that perspective in first. First thing, we want this to fill the image. We want our house to be really the main feature because that's what a house portrait is about, isn't it? Well, definitely it doesn't matter if it's not perfect, but what we just want to do is get the field and make it dramatic and make it interesting. Make it feel like we really cared about this sketch. There we go, see I'm just getting these shapes we've got the rectangle of the front. We've got the rectangle of this roof. We can drop in where our doors going to be. We can drop in where these windows it can be and you can start to see these lines of perspective. What we could've done is identify the lines of perspective in our sketch and put them down but for this side, it's not too hard to just see them to do them by eye. We can pop in just lines for a window here. Again, just think about the perspective for the bottom of the window. That helps us dropping these windows in the right place and we can line them up with the window below as well. Above we've got this slightly awkward little triangle but if we think about it like a triangle, it becomes easy. Then the roof is fairly flat, so just have a look at how angled it really is and it barely creeps above this triangle, does it? Remember as well, it's on a line of perspective. We can exaggerate that a little bit just to make sure we've got it in. There you go that's this face done. Now we've got the awkward phase, the one which is very angled. Luckily for us, we've got a nice push in here so we can just sketch that in. That means we don't have to think too hard about this line. We've also got this run of bricks here, which are providing us a nice line to follow. You can see them going off. Then the other line we can map out is the angle between this corner of the roof and the next corner of the roof and there you go. That's our other line of perspective. Now we can use that to think about everything else like when we're drawing our bricks. We've got this sticking out window. How are we going to do that? I think to be honest, it's okay to start it and at least remember to keep it on these lines perspective but you lease just start it as a simple window. It's not on the main part of the house and it's not super important. If you do want to make it stand out more, to make it more correct, just remember to grab those shapes. It's just a triangle and then a square and a tiny little face here. I'm going to leave it like that. I'm going to cheat and it's not cheating, it's making artistic decision, but I'm going to cheat and I'm going to leave it like that. Now, you can start putting in background if you like but this is about this house. We're doing a house portrait of this house. I'm going to leave it. What we can do is we can bring things down, bring the colors around the composition so that it just fills this house and leave some lovely space around it. We can get a little bit of shadow in here to mirror the bush over on this side for example. Now, that is the pencil sketch done, took about four minutes or so, but you don't need to spend that long. That was mostly me whispering. All you need is this broad outlines. 12. Still Step 1 - Adding Pen: So after the pencil comes the pen, the first pen lines to complete Step 1, our initial sketch. At this point we are now really thinking about texture. Remember, texture starts from those first lines, from the first lines where you're thinking how much do I wobble this line, how much do I move it up and down? We'll also start to think about getting those windows in 3D shapes. We'll start adding a few bricks in and getting the feel of the house, those bare-bones, ready for those beautiful colors. Then our pen. Let's think from the beginning about our textures. It's a nice modern red brick house. As we draw our walls we're getting that red brick feel. At the beginning it's going to look a bit messy and we're not going to quite know if we've done the right thing. Don't forget as we're going along as well to stop picking out these other details. You've got these little boxes at the bottom, you've got the little electricity port up here, electricity port that you'd like, circuit board for the house, I mentioned. Every line that we draw can have that nice texture which is simulating the red brick. That's going to make it easier when we come to our other lines to get those actual red brick fields in. We get to a doorway. We can start just thinking about that doorway. Remember just a few horizontal lines stacked up. There we go. Let's just jump to this line at the back because it'll be easier to build all our roof lines together. We give that nice little sweep just to give it some character. It has got a little sweep, a little dip to it anyway, but just adds a little bit of character. This guttering is nice and straight, so just keep it straight. Then down here on this side I've got another little slightly wobbly line to simulate these tiles. Now what else have we got? Let's get this roof line in. Again, it's got shape, it's 3D. Let's think about these 3D lines. You can see under certain areas we get those areas that we can see under in. We map in the underside of a guttering on the side of the eves. We can do that just by creating little bit of noise with these extra lines. I often describe sketching as controlled chaos and I think it's a really and a sensible way of approaching it really. I would think of it being sensible because that's my idea, but what we're trying to do is we're trying to display all that noise, all that busyness that's going on in the scenes around us. We couldn't do it in a way that just suggest to the eye exactly what's going on without having to draw every little bit. There we go. We're almost there with these key bits. Again, just getting that shape the underneath, joining things up. And now let's do the outside of the windows. Remember the windows in that three-step process where we find the outsides and we can go around and we can find the outsides of all the windows. We're keeping these lines in keeping with our brick texture because that's what these lines are. They are the brick meeting the window. This window is a bit wider. It's not the same as the other window, but if you accidentally sort of miss that, it doesn't matter if you get a slight abnormality or you know it's not perfect, it's really not important. And same here we've got little of extra slot of our door and we got one window. I messed with my pencil sketch, but that's fine. We can just drop it in. Remember, this perspective is going this way. So this line scoops downwards. Over here. We've got our next window. All the time remembering these textures, these lines are textures. And we can get the top in as well, that little curve. We can even get a little window just poking in here, just poking in the edge. So let's just get that in as well. What's next? Well, let's just move on and add some of the extra details, that we got this brush which is hiding some of our perspective. Part of choosing your composition is making it easy for yourself. So this brush is brilliant. It hide some of that detail which we would otherwise have to work out. That's okay. It looks natural and it's a wonderful natural bit of framing. We also got this door sign. Can't talk sometimes when I'm concentrating. We've got this road sign, so we get that in as well. Why not? What else? Any other little details we've missed? Well, there's a few bits and pieces. We've got this drain pipes coming down to, I think I'll add them at the end. So we're left with the fine details on me so we can start getting some of these textures in and don't overdo it because remember, we can come back. So we can always add more after we've done our colors. We're going to add more after we've done our colors. We're going to come back and finish off final details, things like this drain pipes. And remember to follow with all these little brick textures to follow these lines of perspective that we've worked out and drawn in. Then last but not least, the interiors of the windows and getting that shape of the windows and do these lines. Remember we did the practice, it was quite big. So here, it's much smaller. So these lines need to be much more gentle and they don't necessarily all need to be complete lines. They can be just suggestions as well. Especially in these more distant windows where you can't really see them anyway. On the door, couple of little details, is long handles interesting? There's a couple of windows which we can pop in. Then last window here. We're almost there really. All about remembering to get those things, these 3D shapes don't leave it as just a 2D shape. These things are all 3D. I'm going to invent this window and give it lots of shape. There we go. I'm going to finish just by giving ourselves a nice little frame here. It explains the context of this house and the rest of it, we can leave till the end. So I'm just going to rub out some of these more bold pencil lines and then I'll meet you ready with a nice pot of water color, a couple of brushes and we'll start applying our colors. 13. Step 2 - Watercolour Wash: [MUSIC] Step 2 is the colors. We are going back to these lessons. Remember we got the reflections of the windows, we got the two colors to create our roof, to create our walls, and we also added colors to our trees and bushes. Well, that's what we're doing now. We're going to take it step-by-step. We're going to move around from sky to wall, to here, to there. By the end, we'll be ready to just add those final touches and bring everything together. Don't panic during this phase. It's not supposed to look amazing straight away. It takes time, and in truth, it won't be till those final touches where everything just suddenly comes together. We are back and now it's time for our colors. I'm going to bring my colors nice and close. You can see my palette is a bit messy and that's fine. I always say a messy palette is a happy palette. I've got a size 6 round and I got a size 2 mop, which is about a size 10 round brush if you don't have a mop. The mop just got a slightly different shape and it carries a bit more water. What are we going to do? Well, we are going to start with the sky, which is what I said was my favorite way to start. We can see in my little reference photo, it's bit of a moody sky. I actually took this photo in December and I took it not that late in the day, but probably about 3,2 of three o'clock and in December in the UK. That's what skies look like, and I think they're gorgeous. I think they're great fun. It's a moody sky. This is going to be touching in those moody colors. But it's not just moody as it is, it's not just an angry sky. It's got a bit of joy in it as well. We're touching these moody colors, we splash them around and we get them this shapes of color pointing us in, bringing us in to our house. Then we can start playing with some blues and let those blues add a nice heartwarming accent if you like. Then a little bit more. What we can do, we've got this lovely frame from the masking tape so we can bring that color all the way up to that frame and a couple of places and it'll be a nice, crisp cut off edge, and in other places we get this more natural, general fading out. We can come back a bit more water and just let things move and flow. We can leave lots of white. This can be lots of white underneath. That's absolutely fine. Then you get that's our sky pretty much done. We'll see how it dries and then we might be able to add a bit more if we want. Next, I'm going to jump down. I'm going to skip the roof so that we can let this dry, and we can add some lovely colors into our wall. Adding a little bit of water, and then I've accidentally dropped some water into the window, but that's no problem. That's why we have a towel or a bit of kitchen roll. I can come I can just scoop up what was dropped in there, and then we can start again. There we go. Now got the water, not everywhere, but in a few places. We're going to start adding our colors and this is our complimentary colors. For me, my spit of punchy red, and then underneath and the reason I say underneath, because if we look at these shadows and the light, there's a little shadow down here, isn't there? The warmer brown rather than a punchy red is going to be the shadow, at least the start of the shadow, while this red is going to be where all that beautiful light is hitting. We just keep adding little bits, keep that wash nice and varied. It doesn't matter if it doesn't look like a shadow now, we're just getting this suggestion first. It's getting that little drop of varied color moving around and keep coming back, touching and moving around. Now, I'm going to suggest that we don't have to be super precise as well. I like the clear cut-off in places, but then we've also got these lovely loose splashes and things and we can do exactly the same with our house. Let me experiment so you don't have to, as I like to say. If I just drop lots of color in here, and take my reds, lots of water, lots of that brown, I can let lapse of pull down. I could do some splashes and I can let it a bit like the sky. Mirroring the effect of the sky. We can let things run and move and just have a play on the page. We can drop more water in, and this is going to create all interesting textures. When we come back to it, we'll be able to neaten them up or push them around or do whatever we like. I encourage you to play with things like tapping, splashing, use of water, blowing on the page, that kind of thing. There's lots of fun, you can have lots of ways of making your watercolors really interesting. There we go. That's that wash done. A few more splashes and we can start to see these areas, we might want to provide a little extra. This splash is fill that negative space and they push us in towards our image. All of this goes to highlight our focal point, which is this rather lovely house. [NOISE] Then what next? Well, let's move to this bit of greenery. Again, a little bit of green, this is cascade green and a little bit of yellow, and let them move. You see how it's going to link into the house. Well, that's absolutely fine. You can keep them separate if you'd like, but I like a nice bleed between my colors. Like I like this bleed down here. To correct it a little bit if it goes too far, just dry off your brush, make sure it's nice and dry, come in and collect some of that color, push it back. You can even reverse the process by adding a bit of strong wall color, and it will push into the tree. In that way, you'll see it becomes linked, it becomes a natural feeling. I personally really like that feel. There we go. That's this area all done. Let's now move on to our sky. Not our sky, sorry. Our roof is a nice dark color. Let's just go with the moon glow. But if we do that, is it going to contrast enough with the sky? Probably not is the answer. We need something else in there. We need something else to apply that contrast. Is very different from the sky. We could do lots of things and we can see this is actually quite a warm roof. Why don't we take a bit of that warm color from down here, a warm brown and what do we mix that in? We can mix it in the palette or on our page. By doing it on our page, we get this lovely, varied wash again. Again, if it blends into the sky, which I'm sure it will in a couple of places, then all the better. I'm very happy for my colors to paint themselves around. If you want a neater look, then just be more careful that things dry between washes. Just by mixing these colors little by little, creating that lovely varied wash, we suddenly get a nice subtle contrast going on between our different areas. There we go. We can now, while the page is still wet, we can move around and start just implying some shadows. Let's start with the gentle shadow technique. If we take some of our colors from before, our red and our brown, we just make them a little richer, we can get that shadow started. We can do that all around. We can leave though, some of the texture shining through from before. Then we can get these soft edges because it's wet, things will blend and you won't get these very hard-edged shadows. But as we get into these more and more shadowed areas, perhaps you want to flip and we want to start using a shadow color. This is where we get our moon glow and we start popping that on. There'll be time for some definite shadows at the end. When everything's dried, we can go if we want, we can add in some of these much more definite shadows which we're seeing, and I'm sure there are some there. But for now, we can create these lovely loose washes of falls in vivid color by being loose and just bold. Bold is the right word. We loose and bolded with our colors. That keeps everything varied, and watercolor is all about that variation. There you go. I would say we're almost there. Couple of things to finish. This roof here, of course, and we can leave a little bit of white in it to pull it apart from the surroundings, which got lots of rich color. Then we've got this very dark door and this is where you might want to use a color which really matches a door. Well, I seem to think, whenever I sketch our house, for example, our house has a lovely red door. I always try and choose that red specifically. Now this one's got a kind of like an indigo dark door. I've chosen my indigo to just add the color to that door. But you don't have to. You can also flex it like we have been with other things. I would say that is my step 2 done. All the first washes, There are things left to do. There's the windows, there's the brakes, has a little bit more line work, but that all comes in step 3. Don't rush it. We'll get there eventually, and we'll have something really fun at the end. [MUSIC] 14. Step 3 - Bold Touches: Step 3 and hopefully you're staying strong with me and feeling confident. It's time now to add those bold touches, so we're going to be looking at a little bit of extra pen work. We're going to to let our paper dry before we can do that or the pen will bleed and run everywhere. When we've done our extra pen work which is going to include adding more textures and just resolidifying some of our shapes, then we're going to add those bold touches, those bold shadows, those dark windows and a few little brick marks. I'm also going to have a lot of fun with splashes. I love splashes and I think for me and my taste, they add a huge amount to any sketch or almost any sketch. Try it yourself perhaps if you're not feeling so brave with the splashes, just try a little splash on the side. Do a little thumbnail sketch and see how you're feeling, but just to explore and experiment and have fun with this stage take it slowly and feel proud that you got this far and I'm sure it will look great at the end. Here we go, we are mostly dry. A few of these big patches are still wet, but that's fine. What we're going to do, we're going to do the final touches. That's both bit of pen and a bit more color. A pen comes first while our page is still wet. Now, when you use your pen it's going to be a bit bolder than before, so be nice and gentle. This time we're going to be picking out key features and really making them a feature. We've got these tiny little boxes at the front for example and I know that they are white in the reference, but now they're black because we are illustrating this house. We are not producing a perfect replica, we're making something representative. To do that, sometimes we need to make a point with our pen. If you want it you can also be really careful and I have left them white too. You can make them another color. We're just going to go round and we're going to find these key lines first. Again, thinking about texture the whole way we can embolden those important lines. That includes the steps, that includes capturing some of these colors when they've gone a bit wide, a bit outside the initial boundary. That includes these tops. You see where we've got these lovely white lines we've left. Encapture them and leave them white, and that produces a nice space between our two areas. Now we haven't done any texture on the roof yet, so this is our time to start adding those in and you see how we've got these little white gaps that remember we left. Again, we can use those as little scaffolds for our lines. The door is much the same. We come up and down. We leave this white gaps where we've left them, but we can surround them and provide more contrast. We can start thinking about shadows as well. We can create deep shadows in the hinges for example by creating a bold pen line. Now, just conscious. I felt something wet on my palm and I don't want to smudge on my paint, but other than that we're doing well. The windows we're just going to grab this key frame lines and we'll leave them for a bit more color in a moment, but these key frame lines we can embolden and we can find those colors. As we go to them we can start just popping in a couple more bricks if it's needed. I don't feel that you have to at all. Don't feel it, just take your time. It's important not to overdo watercolors and ink because the biggest trap is definitely overworking things. Here we get a bit more boldness and we can see the boldness now because we've got in our colors. We can see the contrast, the saturation that our image can take and that lets us fully explore the pen a little bit more. Now this little bit of roof we can just reshape a bit to make sure that we know where the shadows are going to go. The same along here, the same up here. Do you see how we got that lovely bleed between the roof and the sky? But as we create a bold line, that bleed just feels like a natural thing. It doesn't feel like a mistake. For me it's not a mistake. It's something I encourage in my paintings, but if it was a mistake don't worry about it. If it's not something you wanted, just remember you're going to be able to pull these things back when you get to your final touches, your final sketch. We're almost there. There's a few more places that just need a little bit of line work. We got things we can add like this door, so I think it's a door number. You'll always find little bits you forgot. Like this window here I neglected and this one I neglected. Just dot around, jump around your image and find these things. I also just pop some fake writing on this door sign and get a little bit more shape into this curve. Just again embolden it, bring it to the fore with all the other changes we've made. I think already hopefully you're seeing it's really starting to pop forward. Now we're going to get our small brush out and we're going to do all windows, and remember the windows are reflecting the sky. That makes knowing the colors we're going to use very easy because we know what we used in the sky, and in this case it's mostly these lovely moody colors. We can go in and we can pop some of those moody colors in, and we don't have to be perfect about it. There can be overlap and there can be lots of white as well and window reflections are normally quite messy and challenging to look at let alone to paint. Then I'm also going to drop some of these blues, and these blues you saw glimpse of happiness in the sky. It's not just an angry sky. This is just the same moon glow I was using before and the same cobalt blue. Down below it's definitely much darker there, isn't it? This time we can just use the moon glow and create a nice just locked out shadowy window. Now we're onto those real final touches and go into our roof and we suggest a few little tiles and things like that. We go into our walls, we take some of our darker color and we suggest a few of our bricks. You do it all over and just a few touches here and there. Few splashes always work well. Like I said in the previous lesson some people don't like them, so make your own decision. I think they add a lovely texture. I think they're really fascinating. Then we need to do a bit of shadow, don't we so. Let's take that dark color and find these key shadows. That might be the whole of one side of the wall. It might just be that you decide to focus on some of the other shadows, the shadows under the eaves. We talked about popping little shadows under windows and I'll just show you there. I really like them and I think it's up to you whether you want to put them. They're not necessarily real, but I think they're really lovely. You don't need to put this whole wall in shadow. This wall is already in shadow, look at it compared to this. We're just exaggerating or enhancing some of the shadows. You can simulate shadow with a little bit more splashing. If there's more splashing over here, then there's more texture, there's more depth going on. I think to be honest we're pretty much done. I think if there's a real risk with this sketching and painting if is overdoing it. I think I'm just going to leave it there. I'm sure there's things that I could look at in a minute and decide maybe I'll touch here, maybe I'll do this, but I'm going to sign it and feel proud, feel happy of the sketch I've done of this interesting house. I'm applying colors just to a limited area, but being really clever and rich about how we apply them clever but simple. We've really got a standout house going on here. Thanks for coming along. If you go to the next little bit I'll unveil the sketch, and of course say a big thank you to you. 15. Summary and Thanks!: With that, that is another class done. Now I hope you've enjoyed it and here as promised is the grand unveiling. We, of course, are left with a really fun house portrait, a really bold, punchy sketch, which I'd be very happy to give to a friend, a relative, a loved one as a beautiful present. I hope that you're proud of what you've done. I hope you've learned something, perhaps broken a barrier or just decided, you know what? It's not as hard as I thought it was. It'd be amazing if you can share your projects if you're feeling up for it in the class resources. Please do reach out to me, connect either follow me on Skillshare or on YouTube, or find me on Instagram and tag me in your project there as well @tobyurbansketch. Thank you very much. My final request is, if you have time, please leave a review. It means the world and it really helps spread the word about these classes.