Urban Sketching Fundamentals - Focus on Lines, Pen and Ink

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi, there. Are you an urban sketcher who enjoys using your ink, your pens, perhaps using a line and wash, your pen and watercolor technique, to capture your urban scenes? Are you looking for different ways to finesse your line work, perhaps to experiment with different inks or bring a different character or texture to your sketches? If so, this may well be the class for you. My name is Toby. I'm known as Toby Urbansketch here on Skillshare as well as on Instagram and on YouTube. I specialize in unique, quirky character field sketches using my pens and often my watercolors. One of my favorite tools is my fountain pen. I can use it to create all sorts of textures and interests. I'm just as happy using it to create a tight, neat sketch with lots of beautiful hatching as I am creating very loose semi-abstract, soluble ink sketch that comes to life, or splashing on some beautiful colors to create that different more characterful, more pretty and beautiful, happy feel. In this class, I want to give you a really deep diver; a fundamental look at all the different techniques that I enjoy using. We'll start by looking at different kinds of pens. That might sound really basic, but actually when we start to explore our pens and see how they work for us, the different marks they can make, it can lead us to be a bit inspired to think, what if I did this scene using this pen instead of this one? We'll also have a look at different inks that you might use in fountain pens. How can we use soluble inks to create texture? Perhaps even using our pen with a brush and taking ink straight out of it. There's other really important techniques to think about with ink sketching, and one of those is hatching. We'll do a couple of different lessons on hatching. A basic primer looking at ways to create different amounts of value, different tone for different types of hatching, and then one that I've called advanced hatching, where we can actually use textures; the natural textures of a tree or a brick wall to build up both realism and shape at the same time. Of course, I'll also do a few demonstrations. We'll take all of these techniques, everything we're talking about, we'll put it into practice with a number of different projects from myself. What would be amazing is if you could take some of these things that we talked about, some of the things I've demonstrated, then you sketch along with me and create your own class project. There's a number of references that I've supplied that you could use. But equally, you could use one of your own. Be amazing if you could share that project or connect with me on Skillshare by following me or opening a discussion and asking me some questions. Equally, you can find me on Instagram or YouTube, and I'd love to connect with you there as well. If you have the time, please do leave a review. It means the world and it really helps spread the word about urban sketching and all the classes I've got. Without further ado though, let's get sketching. [MUSIC] 2. My Supplies: What equipment I'm I going to suggest for this class? Well, number 1, we're going to be talking about a few different kinds of pens. So if you flick onto the next lesson, you will see we discussed pens in a lot of detail. Obviously, we will need a pen, but I'm not going to talk about that right now. In one of the scenes at the end, I'm just going to use a couple of watercolors. The exact watercolors aren't important. You could use anything really to add color because it's more about adding a little glaze, something interesting to highlight our work. I do use a few pens with water soluble ink in these classes. Just to move that ink around, I use a couple of brushes. The brushes aren't super important, but they are equivalent to a Size 8 and Size 10 or 12 brush, but they're interchangeable and just any brush to go next, you could probably even get away with just using a little bit of water on your finger and things like that, and experimenting with how other ways you can move water-soluble ink around. The last thing to mention, because I'm just using a normal sketchbook. Often with urban sketching and things like that, you might use watercolor paper because watercolors and things like that feature very heavily. In this, it's all about the ink sketching the line work. I'm just using a simple A4 cartridge paper and sketchbook, which is 160 grams per square meter. Normal watercolor paper being pretty much double that 300 at GSM. Nothing clever, nothing crazy being used in this class it's all about having fun with simple equipment and getting out there and having a sketch. 3. The Class Project: The class project. Well, through these lessons, I'm going to show you all sorts of different techniques. I'm going to combine them in the end with three different demonstrations. These demonstrations come with three different reference photos. You're welcome to use those reference photos for your class project. I'd love you to do that or to just copy your take ideas from the things that I do. Equally, I'd also love you to do your own scene, go sit somewhere outside, go to a cafe, or perhaps if it's cold outside, go and sketch inside with reference photos, something which means something to you, and explore techniques which means something to you as well, the things that you see in this class which most inspire you or make you want to sketch or other things that you've tried out in the past or want to try today. When you're done, if you could share your project in the class gallery, that'd be amazing. I'll make sure to come around and comment, ask a few questions, and give some feedback on anyone who wants that, who pops their project up. Without further ado though, let's get into these lessons, and then we can start, as we watch them, thinking about what we might want to do for our project. 4. Pens in Depth: First thing we need to think about is the kind of pens that we might use. There are lots and lots of different varieties. I've just broken it down into these four types. I've got fountain pens, I've got fudepens, and brush pen, which I'm actually going to join together. Then you've got fine liners. Let's have a little look at how these work on a fresh bit of paper. Let's start with the fountain pens. I've got three here called LAMY Safari pen. I've got one which is called a Platinum Preppy. Both of them great brands of pen. The Platinum Preppy, a little bit cheaper, the LAMY Safari a little bit more premium. They come in various thicknesses and whips of nib. If I start with my extra fine nib, you can see we can draw with it the right way round or upside down. We get two thicknesses of a thin wall and are slightly thicker. But we can also apply different amounts of pressure. Our nibs are quite flexible so you can get a really large bold line even from an extra fine nib. Going up, this is a fine nib. You can see the upside down line is a bit bolder. The right way up is also a little bit bolder. Again, we can probably make it probably similar actually, isn't it? Similar maximum boldness. But the ability to get a really thin line is best shown by the extra fine pen. The advantage of fountain pen is you can change the inks inside. I'm going to do a whole lesson, well, a whole little segment of this class on different inks. Just for now, I'll just I'd say if we look at this, we got a nice brown. If I look at this one, I've got a fun purply pink. Then you can use different inks to cause different effects. These are all waterproof. But if I wash this over, look at how these inks move with the water. Fountain pen's a wonderful flexible tool. I'm going to do a little lesson on different fountain pen inks. If you skip on to that, if you're interested. Otherwise, let's move on to my other kinds of pen. Next we've got fudepen and brush pens. These come in all varieties. My favorite is probably the fudepen. A fudepen is just another kind of fountain pen. If you can see here it's got a bent nib. If I just sketch the nib here it looks a bit like that. We've got a nib which has a real band at the end. That means you could be touching the paper and cause really fine lines, medium lines, or incredibly bold lines. Again, we can use the same principles of ink with a fudepen because we can change the type of ink inside. The advantage of this over a fountain pen is the huge range of lines that you can use. The disadvantage is it's much harder to hold and sketch loosely. You have to have much more of a writers grip. That's not as what for me, not as fun and flexible. Doesn't feel as free. The next is a brush pen. You can get these refillable or you can have them like this, which is a nonrefillable version. They can cause a similar effect to a fudepen. Obviously, a wide range in line thicknesses and quality of line, how the flow comes out if you go quickly. You can co-create all these interesting textures and things. Well worth having a play with in sketching. A really lovely way of creating bold, vivid, illustrative outlines. Last are fineliners. There is just hundreds of these to choose from. I've previously gone through various fineliners in one of my other classes about continuous line sketching called urban sketching, learn to use continuous line drawing and watercolors. If you want to check that out, there's this fairly in-depth lesson about these. Again, I think the principles here are that they come in all sorts of types. You can have fairly thin ones. You can press a bit harder and get a bit bolder line. You can have different colors. I've got here a gray. This is another gray which is just a bit thinner. This is quite thick, actually it's a 0.5 millimeter. This is creating that bold line without pressing and with pressing and even bolder line. Again, you can create fairly fine lines even just with a quite a thick fine line like this. Then similar brands can have things like chisel pens, which somewhere in-between fine liner and fudepen and you can produce different qualities of line. These are all the pens that are worth thinking about. Now with fineliners, the brands which we use for sketching tend to be waterproof. You can see, they don't flow with the water at all. This is important because it means that we can apply watercolors, we can apply marker pens, all sorts of things on top, but our lines are going to stay nice and crisp. What do I use? Mostly I use fountain pens. Fountain pens and fine liners produce very similar quality of line, but fountain pens, I find more flexible. I just get a bit more joy to end up using them. It's more fun holding a bright red interesting pen which feels like your thing, rather than a disposable little piece of plastic. Maybe that's one of the bigger reasons actually that I like the fountain pens. Emotionally, I enjoy them all. But I do think they're more flexible. I love being able to change things up and things like that. In the next lesson, like I said, we're going to be looking at fountain pen inks, different types of ink that you might use, and think about the effects we can produce with those. 5. Fountain Pens and Ink: Let's have a think about the types of ink that we can use inside our pens. Now, my go-to, if I use this, this is a fine nib LAMY Safari. If I just draw a nice little house, you can see we get a nice range of line quality. You could do fine lines. I can come and do nice and thick lines and the ink I'm using for this, this is pretty nice black ink. It's called Platinum Carbon Ink, black. Now, this has got granules in it which settle and stain and don't move with waters or watercolor. Now what that means is if we come on top and let's say I just take a tiny bit of watercolor from my palette on the side here, I can go over that and I get very little running. You can see where I've gone really dark though and really bold, some of the ink does run. Now if I waited five, 10 minutes and that wouldn't be the case, that ink would stay completely still. But the bolder you go, the longer you have to wait for the ink to fully dry. The other ink that you can use. Well, there's hundreds kinds of ink that you can use, to be honest. In this fountain pen, I've got some simple LAMY cartridges, so this is just their own brand cartridges of ink. Well, I'm going to take one out. Just a normal cartridge filled with normal fountain pen ink. What happens if we do the same thing, will we get the same flow of ink? Obviously, this one is a different color, but the same flow. This is still a fine nib. You can still get the same variation in line quality. Now, what can be fun with these things though, is that if we take a bit of water, suddenly we can really activate our ink and it will flow and move and we can create tone and we can even create shadows. We can even pick up some of that ink and use it elsewhere on our page to perhaps maybe to draw a little apple, you get the idea. You can use these things as both line-work and to create tone. I like to use a couple of different inks. I've got this nice pink one. Probably my favorite is this brown. It's like a nutty brown. This is an ink by [inaudible]. I'll show you the cartridge in it in a second. We'll see again, it creates this lovely wash. When you wash it, it really enlivened, it becomes super interesting. Obviously, you can do the same with black inks and all sorts. As I said, the brown ink I'm using here is Waterman Absolute Brown Ink and they do a full range of different watercolor inks and not waterproof but inks which will be soluble with water. There are loads and loads of inks you could try. These are some of the ones that I have. But this comes with a little word of warning. There are all sorts of things like India ink, so the Winsor & Newton inks are a good example of that. They come in all crazy colors. Now, India inks will probably block up your fountain pen. You can use them with a dippy pen, for example, where you get a nib doesn't have a cartridge, but you dip the pen in and you can produce exactly the same line work from any ink. They're very flexible. The obvious disadvantage is you always have to have that pot to dip from. Then the other thing to have a little think about with our inks is cutting in a converter. This is a converter for a LAMY and what it means is that you can fill it up. You may well probably have seen one before. It means you can fill up your ink. You just dip it into the ink pot, fill up your pen, and away you go with some lovely ink work of whatever ink color, whatever you want to try. 6. Line Quality in Three Tips: Firstly, I guess, what is line quality? Well, line quality is actually simple things. Is it a sweeping quick line? Is it a firm bold line? Is it random moving around? Is it continuous, discontinuous? Line quality is describing the type of mark that we're making. The type that mark that we're making might depend a little bit on the pen we're using, but also how we use the pen. The pen we're using goes back to the lesson we talked about before, where you can use all different pens for different things. But at the same time, all pens can be used for lots of different things. There's flexibility even in a single pen. Now to demonstrate quality of line, I always think the best exercise, the best bit of practice is a simple still-life. What I'm going to do, we'll do two things, a bad one and a good one. If we start with a bad one, our still life is going to be a pear, and an apple, and a banana. They're sort of together. They're on the page. You can tell banana is probably behind, but only because it's lines are cut out. But they could be floating. We could be looking at them top down. It's really hard to tell exactly what is going on with this. And they all look the same. There's no interest, there's no variation. Now in reality, what happens when you look at things further away, they're fainter because they're fainter, the textures are fainter. When you look at things closer they're bolder. That's one of the first things to think about. Then the other is to think about just introducing variation. Let's take it step-by-step. The first thing I suggest thinking about when you do your quality line is as you start, start loose. Start with a faint and easy quality of line. That means if you make a mistake, you do completely random to the lines here, obviously, my pen is wrong. Well maybe let's make it less obvious. There you go. Pear is not bad right, but let's just keep sketching anyway. Maybe our apple takes a few goes to get right as well. Then the banana, we're not sure if it's in front or behind, so we just sketch over the top. The quality of line here is really loose. This gives us an interesting image. Loose, it gives us one which is flexible and let's us add variation on top. Number 1, start loose. Number 2, think about variation between objects. We can start off by reaffirming our pen. Now that we've got the whole image, we can work out. This is where the pear goes. Then we can find the banana. It's actually behind and the apple is in front of that as well. But we still didn't have much variation. How are we going to introduce some variation and what variation or what's the variation going to do for us? Well, variation, in this case, can be the texture of the line. Let's say, in the pear, what we want is to get a bit more like it's a bit bruised, bit of an old pear. Now we can introduce lines which are applying some texture. The apple perhaps also has got a bruise on it. Whereas the banana is going to be very smooth and very new banana. It's got also this other side too, also very smooth. Now we've got some variation and that's implying texture. Variation could also imply depth. At the beginning, remember I said texture, depth, and relationships. If we take one sheet, let's use the same pen just to show you that one pen is flexible. You'll find that if you make something nice and bold in the foreground, that thing comes forward. If we just go around this, we can still use a loose line, but not so loose, and bold line. See how it lifts forward. Same if we just make the apple nice and bold, it lifts forward. Now notice how I've only made the apple bold on one side, and it's still lifting forward. The reason for that is the boldness is relative to the banana here. Because it's bolder than the banana, less force it explains the relationship that explained the apple is in front. We can also use that for the weight at the bottom by making the lines where the apple, the banana, and the pear touch the ground, heavier or heaviest even. That shows the weight of the object. It shows the relationship of that object with the ground. They're my simple tips on how to think about your line-work. Start loose, use variation to show texture, but also use variation to show depth and relationships between objects and between the objects themselves and the general atmosphere and environment that they're in. [MUSIC] 7. Hatching - Basics of Tone and Value: The next thing we're going to have a think about is value and tone in online work. Again, we're going to keep this simple, and it's more of an exercise. It lets us just play with some concepts. I'm going to draw the same shape three times. Then we'll have a think about how we can use our pen to really simply employ value and tone. Why is value and tone important? Because it shows shadow and shadow shows, shape, and volume. We don't know. We might presume that this is a box facing like this, but other people might presume it's a box facing like this. We just don't know until we've got a full human shape. That comes, as I said, through shadow tone. A simple way of demonstrating tone, the simplest way that I know overall that I use regularly is for just simple hatching. This can be just a vertical line. We don't need to be any cleverer than that. A nice way to vary that is, if we've got a shadow here, so we've got the light source coming this way. This is light, this is shadow. There should also be a shadow on the ground. Instead of vertically hatching, we can separate out plane. We can separate out this plane from plane of the floor by changing the angle of the hatching. Now we've got hatching which is basically going at 90 degrees or almost 90 degrees to this. But what it's doing is it's following the perspective of this plane that's showing that it's flat. Another thing we can do with our hatching is we can provide a multi-directional hatching. This way we can apply tone very easily to multiple sides, but vary more easily. We could go that, gee, none of this box is perfectly white. We've still got this shadow cast over here. Because we still got our light source coming from here and going down. Then what we can do is go to this must be darker than this. Now we just apply a crosshatch. If we think actually it's even darker down the bottom, we can apply a further crosshatch. Maybe the dark is point is the very bottom. We can do yet another crosshatch. In this way, you can build up different values, and it's worth having a play even just with simple squares. Draw out five squares. This will be one, this is five. This is your lightest, then this is the next lightest, then this is your next lightest. Now this is getting towards being very dark, and just see how actually side-by-side you can immediately tell that just by applying different layers of hatching, you can really build up. You could even do six, and six in this instance will probably be just blocking it in. You could even separate these things out more. You could do 1.5, which is just a few vertical lines. So 2.5, which would be just a couple of crosshatches. In this way you can get really granular, really careful with the amount of shadow that you've got, the amount of value. I'm just using really simple technique. I'm just going to finish off my light shadow there. You can see that we've got lovely variation going on. In a minute. I'm going to show you this one more technique, but then I'm also going to show you in another class different kinds of hatching. If you just flick onto the next lesson, different kinds of hatching for different kinds of objects. This is the simplest form of hatching lines, crosshatching. But there are other ways we can do it for other kinds of things like trees, for example. Now the last thing I want to think about in terms of ink and tone is actually just using a different ink. Instead of using our waterproof ink, we could have used a non-waterproofing. For sake of argument. I'm going to say we used a nice brown ink to do our box. You go on a brown outline. What we could then do is just do some really loose hatching. To know this is going to be dark. Little bit very loose hatching, and then a little bit of fairly loose hatching here as well. Then we can come in with some water. Now we can use the water to create a more gradual time, all just from our ink work. Even just by varying the amount of water, we can vary the darkness. We could come back in and touch back in even more tone. If we want some dark areas, then we can use water to move some more of that ink around and create these textures, but also these variations in ink tone and things like that. That's the techniques I use for images like this. Where you can see we can just do an ink sketch but get a really lovely shape and sense of place without even needing to bring out our watercolors or pens or anything else. There you go. There's three simple way is to use ink sketching to develop tone, shape, shadow and really take your ink sketch to something beyond a simple outline. 8. Hatching - Advanced: [MUSIC] I mentioned in the last lesson that there are other ways to hatch. So we've got a nice vertical hatching, very simple, very easy, very quick. Now if we just draw a couple of really simple trees and another one here, we can see that, well, a tree's got lots of different bits of light and shadow, hasn't it? We can start sketching in clumps of leaves like this. If we use our vertical hatching, it can provide really lovely, perfectly good graphics sense of all these shadows and we can use that very easily, very quickly to produce a tree which is now developing shape and really provide some crosshatching. Quickly, this shape will build up and we can add in little branches and actually we've got a very; I'm going to call it very serviceable, very nice little tree, not much far still using the same lovely style of hatching. There's another way you can do it as well. We chose a bit more natural, to me at least. What we can do is, we can start drawing basically leaves, so little random shapes. If I make this bigger, all I'm doing is quite random natural feeling kind of squiggles, fairly random little leaf shapes which are suggestive to me, at least of these kind of leaves and things like that. We can move around the image and come back to the same areas or current side. What we're doing is, like the hatching, we're building up ink lines this time with a texture to them which is suggestive of the texture of the tree, suggesting leaves. We can extend this to the trunk. We can use some lines which are representing the bark and then we can come back and we can start building in to our tone. We can stop building in those same branch-like patterns and again, we've got a tree building up very nicely. This one feels a bit more natural, a bit less rigid, a bit less illustrative, and more towards a naturalistic sketch. We use those same principles so the idea here is that we're using lines representing something to build up, not just the tone, but also a feel of the texture. So a good example of that would be to have a field. We can do the same with little grass so we can find shadow is in the grass by doing little lines which build up the shadows and we have a little tuft of grass elsewhere. Why is the shadow in that grass? Well, maybe that's because there's a big wall here and actually that wall has a shadow on this side as well so we can now show that shadow if we're drawing little brick or stone-like patterns. Then before you know it, you've got texture and tone. You can still do a couple of little bricks on other places and you can bring in maybe a little fence post beside it and things like that. There's plenty of other detail you can bring in without overcoming the value of the important shadowed side. So hatching mark to the advanced version of hatching is to start integrating your hatching with your textures so that you don't just produce a flat object with shape, you produce a object with shape and texture to that shape, like in these examples here. 9. Create Ink Washes from Fountain Pens: It's time to have a think about how we can use soluble ink to create interesting effects on a page. Now, what I'm going to do, I'm going to use some brown ink first. Again, we'll draw a really simple box. This time we'll be looking solely down on the top of the box. With this, we can just apply a really quick and easy wash and we can move the ink wherever we want really. It can move around left, right, down. It can generally create some tone. That's not really control, its not really, we haven't thought about it very hard. How can we think about it a bit more to create something which is a bit more controlled? Well, if we do the same square again, this time, what we need to think about is, where are we going to want the tone? Let's say the light is coming this way now, so this is going to be the darkest areas. If we load up this shape with a bit of ink and we load up bottom as well so we can cast a shadow. Now we've created a bigger reservoir roofing. We can take our same brush and this time we can gently wash the ink. Where we've loaded up the lines with more ink, we can immediately create a much darker wash, much more variation, and we can bring that wash out. We are also thinking about how we're using the water and the direction of the brushing the water in to create this, to wash in the right places rather than getting it everywhere like this. It's no good just throwing water on because we're not going to create a controlled effect. This is of course, rescuable. What we could do is load up the page now. We could come and give ourselves more ink to work with. We don't need to be stuck with just the first stuff that we put on the page. We can give ourselves more room to work with and we can build a tone that way. Equally, this is still wet and we can drop ink in and we can get interesting patterns. Do you see how this bloom out and you can use that ink to create these patterns over there, just move it up, move it around, or leave it. As these interesting textures, which might be snow, it might be a mountain, it might be flowers. Depends on the color of the ink, depends on the scene. But how else could we use our ink well, create another square. This time we'll leave the lines alone. We've got our pink pen here, so we can show the different ink on here. What we can do, we can just use it as a little reservoir. Not sure we can use it almost like a little watercolor pen. We can just move it around. We can pick up bits of ink and we can use it in that manner. We can even splash just by flicking the ink pen alone. We can combine ink, so if we've got a pink there, we could put some brown in there and start creating varied washes. If you have number of colors even, you can imagine how you could very easily build up a scene, to have all interesting things going on. When everything's nice and dry, you could come back in with the same ink, and use it as a hard line or just for sake of argument, you could use a permanent ink, so water fast ink which doesn't spread. Then you could come and maybe you want to add little details that you meant to make the lines bolder. Thinking about quality of line, which is in one of the next lesson. You just want to create some firm outlines on top of this washes you've already made. You can do that and then safely wash over this ink again because we know it's dry fast. Those are a few techniques that you can use to just use an ink pen, with normal soluble ink in it and to wash that around and move it around and let it flow all over the page. That's by creating simple shapes. Thinking about where you use your brush, letting yourself redraw and load up the shapes with the right amount of ink. Or even taking the ink straight from the pen like it's a watercolor pen and then combining ink. Speed up two soluble inks or soluble and insoluble ink, which lets you create different effects on the page. Anyway, that's my very simple tips for different ways that you can use ink to create tone. Other than, of course, hatching, which we will talk about in one of the other lessons. I know we'll be using this in one of the demonstration pieces at the end of the class. 10. Scene 1 - Fountain Pen and Fude Pen: For our first scene, what we're going to do is just use a couple of pens, we'll have a fudepen or a brush pen or really bold fineliner. We'll use a fine or extra fine fountain pen or again, a fineliner. I'm going to do this little image up here. I'm going to do it just an ink using hatching to create an interesting image. Nothing more clever than that. This is a really lovely, quick technique for capturing your scene when you're out and about and you don't need to carry much, you could even just carry one pen and some paper. Let's start by just capturing these big shapes. I didn't always work left to right or middle. Now, just how I feel about a given image. What I want to experiment with today, we'll go from left to right and just pick out these obvious big shapes. As you want to know more about what I mean by picking out shapes again, if you check out my previous class, which is learning to use continuous line drawing for urban sketching, that's on my profile. You'll see some nice lessons there about picking out shapes and things like that. What I'm looking for basically is, here's a triangle, here is a I wanted to say a parallelogram or we don't have this end. We're not quite sure exactly, but it's a rhomboid of some kind and we're just simplifying everything down into its constituent shapes. This window can be a square and then we can just provide some other squares inside it. That way we don't have to draw the window, we just have to draw a really simple geometric shapes. This wall can be made into a square and it continues off here behind this drain pipe, but still essentially a simple square. Next we got just some little vertical lines, really nothing more complex than that, which are outlining this window. We can pin that side down as well. Then we just got a tiny bit of roof that we can see they're a little bit older. Already we are with these really loose lines building things up. Because they're loose it means we can change things if we decide things are wrong, we need to move something. That's no problem. Going to pop in this little window roof as well. Then I'm going to introduce this lovely wire, which is flicking up through our image. Across here we've got a long, refined Hemingway. At some point there's a chimney, but keep it loose. You don't need to sketch that chimney. Now I'm going to do is just check the relative height of this roof. You can see this corner actually is where the roof emerges. That's a really useful so comparative measure to get our sketch in approximately correct proportions. Again this wall, join as at the point where if you continue drawing, this line, is where that meets. Again, we can use these simple comparisons to get not just our shape, but also the size of our shape correct. Here, the roof could be complicated, but if we just cut it into a square and a triangle, suddenly it's quite an easy shape together. Same with this set of overlapping shapes, got the different things in the background. There's a little tree we can just grab here as well. We can make a bit more of that tree and that lets us practice some of those alternative hatching styles. Then coming around, we've got this pavement. If you just follow that lovely flow, it will just connect everything and give everything a nice. Feel free. Now I think this is a bit low, so what I'm going to do is lift up my building. We can do that because our lines are nice and loose and you'll see that this actually all comes together as we build up our lines are not hatching, doesn't matter that we made a mistake or that we've changed things. You can keep things loose and things will work out. Same up here, we've got our chimney which we can now put in relatively easily. We can just overlap it. Pop in a couple of little chimneys. There you go. Now what do we need to do? We need to just move around and start adding these textures, these details. Let's start up here. We've got our lovely roof, and again this is all in shadow. Let's do this idea that we're building up tone while also building up texture. We can do these toll-like hatching. Form is touching, because it's repetitive line work, which is certainly going to build up the values of what's in there. Under here is very dark. Let's apply this nice simple vertical lines. Now the vertical lines don't have to be uniform. They can be if you want, but they certainly don't have to be. They don't have to be super neat. They can start earlier or end earlier or even overlap. All these things are absolutely fine. These windows a little bit more complicated they've got different shadows and shapes going on inside. But just simplify things. Just find that there's a little half, whole half in a little bits of window covered. This is also in shadow, so we just bring down some simple lines all the way across. Then we can start finding the shadows that are on the street. I'll just change the plane. What we can even do is just going to move this to make life easier. We can do some extra hatching from underneath this curve line. What that does is it shows that this step, because the quality of this hatching changes and then we can introduce more hatching above the curve lines. Again it's just suddenly introducing this idea of a step in our scene. This back house is relatively light here and I'm going to provide it sunlight shining on it across here, to light up this whole street. I'm going to do that by first hatching just a little bit and then coming in and using my pen upside down to get the finest line, I can. Just apply some simple shapes, squares and rectangles for windows, doors. It doesn't need to be anything cleverer than that. Then we've got these same ideas on this roof and if we squint there's a probably similar level of tone and darkness, isn't it, to this roof up here. We'll just do the same idea of hatching, but also texture getting a few of these vertical squiggles going up. The same in this roof, which is probably a little bit lighter than both of those roofs, so it's going to get a little bit less of our hatching/texture marks down here. Well, it's lighter, but I think it's just the shadow. The reason it's lighter is because it's not gray. We're going to just apply a nice, simple set of hatching there about the same as we move along here. A little window as well, and then we can build in some of these little brick marks and a little roof here, a little window in the back. Now because this is definitely background, what I quite like doing is just applying a uniform, straight hatch to that and that just pushes it back; it shows it's got some tone. The colors fade. The further away something is, the less intense the color, less saturated, and we can show that really simply by just applying less tone, doing a simple, uniform, non-eye-catching hatch. Now this tree, we'll do some of our different hatching on. We'll just apply some random levels of squiggling to get this lovely little hatch here. How are we doing? Well, we're gradually building up a bit of an image, aren't we? I've left this road blank because I want it to have this idea of light pulling along, and so we're changing the reference a little bit to fit with the artistic idea. That doesn't mean we have to leave it without texture. We'll just put some of these little marks on there. We can give some little slabs on the pavement as well. Now it's time to just introduce some of the line quality considerations we had from one of our classes as well. With a fudepen, a bold fineliner, or just pressing really hard with your current fineliner, we can find those darkest darks to create these darkest shadows, but also think about how bold something is and how much that will lift it forward if I put it next to another object. This is in the front, this whole image in the front, so we're going to go around, and just give it a nice, thick outline, and that has the advantage of also giving us some of these shadows, which we can enlarge, no problem, and it has the advantage of just neatening up some of our old pen work if that's what we want to do. Again, it can come all the way round like this. We can even block in a lot of this roof, but leaving little touches of light to show that it's not a flat object. I got this drain pipe, and we can just give a little shape to that drain pipe so that it's clear. Despite being a flat, black thing, it has got its own shape and feel. Then we can do the same with these other lines. Always just thinking about the outline; perhaps I'm making a bit bolder than these internal lines because I want the outline to be what's pushed forward, not a random segment of the building. With the windows, I want the frames to feel 3D, so I want some little lights and reflections coming through my otherwise quite bold line work. Then this, the curb, we will pop in nice, bold shadow; less bold here because we haven't got a shadow, but I do want it to come forward towards us. As we work back, we'll try to just do less bold, but still nice and graphic quality, but overall, less bold work. I was just about feeling what you feel about the lines and experimenting and just getting to know how your pen works, how your mind works, how you like an image to feel because not everyone will like such super bold lines, and not everyone will like really thin lines, so just know what you want and experiment, and find out what your style is. We can use our fudepen, just like the brush pen I showed you, it can produce different qualities of line and different textures. By doing little fast marks, we can do the same thing. We can introduce different textures which are giving us a different idea of what's going on here. Really dark shadow for there. I don't want to cover up too much of our texture here, but we can apply little intensely dark areas, especially around these connecting points. Lastly, this little curve as we come forward. There we go. Pretty much, I could call that a complete sketch and be perfectly happy with it. We could continue going around with some more hatching and things and just getting out a little bit more character and just pulling out a few more bits of detail and things like that if we want as well. For example, we got our bold lines, so where do we start adding in some little bits of brickwork. What we don't want to do with that lovely ink sketch is overwork it, and make it too busy, but we have got this freedom and flexibility to keep playing if we want as well. Nifty little bricks on the back here as well, keeping the ideas the same, and that means that the viewer, the eye, the brain immediately connected these bricks to these little marks, and then it understands that we're looking at the same thing in a different place further away. It's all these shortcuts. We're just trying to help whoever is viewing get the idea that we want them to from our image without them having to work too hard. We can add a little wire coming off here. Little things like that just give a bit of flow through the image. I'll just put a lovely chimney at the top corner there, which perhaps would be a nice framing point with some bold pen work. There we go. The last thing I'm going to do, and this is controversial in that some people love it, some people hate it, but I like providing sometimes, in sketches like this, a nice frame. That frame could underlap, so it can come inside some of our line work. It can overlap some of our line work, but I think suddenly, when it's got a frame, for me, that just gives even something which has an unfinished feel like a sketch, which isn't supposed to have a totally finished feel necessarily. It gives it a lovely final touch, which is really interesting to look at, really interesting to just imagine how the artist came to create this image. There you go. There is my ink-only sketch using just normal black ink, which is waterproof. We could put water on this, we could splash some colors on this, or we can leave it as it is. The next one we'll be doing, we'll be using some colored and water-soluble ink to create different kinds of tone. 11. Scene 2 - Soluble Ink: Now we're going to do this scene up here, and we're going to be using some browning little bit of pink ink. These are going to be washed with a tiny bit of water, just using any old process. This is a Size 8 round brush. I'm also might use a little bit of fine liner at the end just to capture some of those shapes in a more rigid way, but we'll see how things progress because sketching is all about being flexible as well. I'm going to start this time in the middle with this house and just really gently capture these shapes. Remember, as well these shapes they're going to move. When we put water on, we're not going to have all the details that we've to painfully sketch in at this point. There's not much point in trying too hard to get this sketch perfect. It's going to move. It's going to wobble around and I think it's going to get pushed around and thrust places we didn't necessarily intended, but that's okay because then we can respond to that. This is where it becomes art rather than a photo. We can learn as well to control that ink to greater extent just with a little bit of practice. Just getting in the important shapes. These rocks, for example, and then the stairs, which provide a lot of the the flow of the image, I don't know they commonly freeing a nice curve into the image. We then got this interesting wall. This is where shapes are important because look at how awkward, it is really for short and it's going up the slope. But if we just break down the actual wall itself into a series of squares and the squares just really simply relate to each other, then actually we can build up very easily rather an effective idea of this wall without having to work out really any of that perspective. It just flows together and happens after we joined up these squares. Part of that is just confidence and not overthinking it, not looking at what you've done and judging it is terrible because it's probably not right. I'm happy that it looks good enough in effort, to me it does look good enough. Another important part of the flow of this image, I think it's this coastline, this ridge coming down, joining up here. An interesting thing to think about with when we know we're going to wash the ink, we know we're going to meet is that we need enough of a reservoir of ink for our shadows. For example here this shadow, and in these trees there's lots of shadow. What we want to do is leave enough linework that when we wash the ink, when we move the ink with a brush, we can actually be able to create new shadow because there's enough of an ink reservoir sat on our page. There we go. A very loose sketch starts catch my brown ink. Then I'm just going to pick out some nice warm highlights with my purple link. These rooftops can be surrounded with pink. Again, I'm going over the top few times because I know I'm going to wash this ink down and I want there to be enough ink at the top to wash down. We've also got some little bits of warmth going on in here where there's sunshine. Planning this interesting wall we've got some nice opportunities, I think for lovely bits of color to come through. Lastly, is just do a few touches along our richland. Next we come in with our water, and I'm going to just control the amount of water on the brush so that we can not lose control of our image. But do you see how immediately this activate that ink and produce this lovely wash. This brown will then form this nice, slightly warm, ready, interesting color as well, which I think compliments this vivid saturated purple pink. What we're not doing is flooding page with water. What we're doing is applying water in a controlled manner and using these patches of color as little reservoirs to create tone. We can go a bit more random if we want in a few places, but mostly we're trying to actually do it in quite controlled way. I want this really shiny side of the building to stay bright. I'm not going to randomly do water around too much there. Same here. I want these trees to have a bit of shape. Although they're very loosely sketch trees, but we can still apply that shape. Same these. Remember we drew these shapes. The shapes facing us are dark, the ones facing up the lighter. We could just use a little bit of water and control where our sketched ink goes. In the stairs, just continue these horizontal suggestions with some horizontal linework. Then these lovely bits of pink, so I must confess, I had already forgotten about, but they activate lovely. Don't mean they just pop into your face and go, look at what we did earlier. There we go. That's line and Wash 1 done. What I like to do is just go back over things so we can now just pull out some of these darker lines. Where we think we need a bit more tone, maybe in some windows, we can now in our second lot of penwork, we can actually introduce even more linework. We can see where things may not have fully worked or fully formed a shadow and we can give them more shadow. Notice I'm drawing while the page is still a little bit wet. Things are moving. That's one. We're going to move them anyway. It's all about just playing, experimenting with what you got, what the water and the ink has wanted to do for you, and therefore, what you can do with that. Someone gave me a quote, very interesting quote the other day, which I think is just as relevant to watercolors as it is to your ink. They said the pigments are having a party on the page and that's basically what we're trying to do. We're trying to facilitate this ink to do this thing and create lovely shapes and interest for us. Then maybe a few more touches in here. There's quite a lot of tone in here. Then we can come back in again and really simply just in line, again, few of these touches and start to introduce more specific shadows. What's wonderful about this is that you don't have to carry anything really, is that even just the one brush in a single fountain pen would be enough to create really interesting tonal art. It's using our watercolor skills or our shading skills. You can get a real depth and interest building up remarkably quickly. They might wonder if we can do classic things like little splashes, and you can. So if you just pick up some ink, you can easily do similar interesting effects like this brushes. We could vary these brushes, bring in a little bit of our brown ink. You can also just use the pen as a single reservoir if you really wanted to get bits of deep tone building up somewhere. I wanted to just amp up the tone in this cliff. I just come in and use my pen as a little pink pop almost. I'd play with a little bit of black ink as well. Let's just do a tiny bit. I don't want to do too much. But just to show you how you can then contrast these warm tones against something a bit colder, which is black, very cold feeling tone, isn't it? Something which isn't going to wash and move. We could just use it to facilitate some of these outlines a little bit more to outline some of these shapes we've created. We don't need to do much to actually create a lot of interesting effects. Again, feel free to find this controversial. But I'm going to come around with my brown pen this time. I'm going to use some of these outlines and I'm going to create a nice little frame. This frame is just, see how we can touch in an outline some of these nice little areas. We can even come around these little flips. We can come into some of these trees and then out. Suddenly we've got this lovely scene framed, creating this interesting effect to us. There you go. A little ink sketch using soluble ink this time, no hatching, but using different techniques to build up tone and interest in our ink sketching that we can use as an urban sketching technique. 12. Scene 3 - Ink and Watercolour: Last scene is an interesting one, which we're going to just use our linework this time. Back to the waterproof ink, simple linework. This time is glaze of watercolor to produce a scene which is all about that ink, all about that linework, but has that vivid loose watercolor feel to it as well. The reference is up here. We can start. The focal point is this church, isn't it? We're going to just start therefore by cutting it, gradual outlining. This is where shapes and really loose sketching are really important. This is that so first principle we talked about in the first class. These lines don't have to be right. In fact, I could draw one over here, and one over here, maybe more like this. That doesn't matter because what we're going to do is gradually pull this image together, as we find the shapes. Any mistakes you make at this point, anything which you feel is wrong, we'll, either we can just fit them later or it will disappear as we find these shapes. I'm just starting by trying to work out, where do these spires go? Where do these little things? They're basically rectangles aren't they? They've got their box as well so there's a line down the middle aside here, aside there. Same here. Because of the angle we're looking at this side is smaller to see than it is on this one. They've also just got these little patterns underneath, which is just a series of lines, really series of horizontal lines. This comes down. You can see this doesn't fully line up. That's fine too. Let's just line it up again. We can move it because the lines are so loose. They'll move, they'll flex and bend to where you need them to be. Now if I come in and draw really hard, fixed, heavy lines, that wouldn't be as possible. There's no real sense of brickwork to this. There are large bricks. Because there's no sense of brickwork we can produce these long lines so the outline is very definite for the church, isn't it? It's not like some old buildings where you'd be doing these little wobbly lines. We think about the character, we're thinking about how to make it feel what it is and even from the outside with these lines we're doing now. Got these little windows to bring in and you can just start with loose shapes and mirrors them on the other side because they are the same. We've got the clock, which is just another shape, isn't it? Under we got some little window like objects as well. Then what's going on here? Another window which is disappearing off behind our tree line. Now, as we've built this up quite nicely, I'm going to decide how we're framing it. What we're doing is we're using these trees as a simple framing mechanism for our church. This is another example of how we use linework, quality and linework to show something is different or to provide a visual shortcut. These trees as we see are different to the church, but they're obviously different to church because they look different, they have different texture and that's what we can immediately simulate by doing these little squiggly lines here. We then have a decision to make, how much we want to introduce the lobe, because we could just make this a really simple wash, but couldn't we? But we could introduce some of these other little features. We've got a couple of lamp posts for example, so we could move the lamp post maybe. Why don't we move a lamp post and make an artistic decision that we want to have it poking out above the tree line and then going down and disappearing off the edge of our image. That way we could also put in another over here. We could just change its orientation and totally changing. We're taking a feature from the scene and moving it around. This is okay. These are all totally legitimate things to do. Who knows which angle we're looking at this church from. Now, I'm going to just use that hatching technique, the random hatching to build up a little bit of tone in our trees, especially on the side here which is much more in shadow than over here. That's just preventing variation to flock to our scene. Variation in tone, variation in quality. I want these lines to be behind, but actually I'm going to start by crossing over because we can always re-introduce forward lines which bring things forward. Now in our church there isn't too much shadow, but we can find a few shadows, so we can use some nice hatching just to find where the shadows are and where there's bold edges and very slight shadows. We can exaggerate them. Where there's windows we can use hatching to show you that shadow. The same for our clock, and for this one here. Then we just make a little more of this shadow. We can introduce a few shadows just on the size of things. It's okay. At least for me, it's absolutely okay to be inventive and find shadows which explain the shape. Even if the shadow isn't strictly there in the image, the shape is there and it's okay to then use a shadow to make that shape more discernible, more obvious and more interesting. This way we can build up quite interesting sketch. It's full of character, full of interests. All we've done so far is linework. I'm not going to do some super bold linework at the moment. We will have to think at the end if we want to add some in but what I'm going to go for now is our watercolors. I'm going to keep it really simple. I'm going to do a bit of a sky, and that's going to be some cobalt blue or primary blue. That's just going to frame our church. Remember how I call this a glaze or a layer of watercolor. That for me that means light colors which doesn't have to be super realistic, but trying to basically make the lines appear interesting and add a bit of life, but it doesn't have to be perfect or need to be brilliant or anything. It's just providing a bit of extra interests. All of that was just an excuse to explain why I'm going to let all my colors run together. I'm using a bit of a, this is called cascade green, this green and a bit of hansa yellow. That just gives us a nice, do you see that nice fairied wash? Now as we get more on to this side, I'll use more of the green because remember it's got a higher value, it's more shadowed. I'm just going to let that lamppost be an outline as well. In our building itself, we can leave it as a negative space so we could apply some nice light tone to it. It got a little bit of perylene violet, which is a nice file it, but it's actually rather a neutral color for something called violet. With that, we can just apply really gentle shadows. Just enhancing again that linework that we've already done. We can soften it a bit and move it around, so we get a more interesting gradual wash rather than aggressive or broken up wash like we had before. Already you can see just with a little bit of touches of color on a simple sketch, we're building up a really interesting scene. We could keep going with this. We could go for ages if we wanted. Often it's very tempting to keep going and going, isn't it? But I'll tell you what, why don't we stop there? Let it dry and just see if we want to touch up these colors a little bit. There we go. I'm not sure, I think the colors are looking nice on there. They're glazing, they're providing shape and little bit of interest. What we could do is come back. Again, if we use our offline line we could come back and we can use these principles to pull things forward, or to highlight things in our scene. We could make our lamppost just a little bolder and then it's evident that they are in front of the greenery. We could use this slightly bolder penwork to turn around the outline of our trees and things. Suddenly that definitely providing a visual frame, is a different quality and it's allowing the church just be there in the middle and not joined. It's providing that visual difference between the church and the greenery. Equally, we could just embolden some of these lines at the bottom where the church and the trees meet. Just bolding those lines again pulls it apart. Whereas these lines which are fading pulls the top, allow it to be something in the distance at the same time. The last bit perhaps I would do is just bringing out a little more boldness in the edges of these windows and that really allows them to pop as a feature. These are now a feature not just a texture, they're not another shadow. They actually got their own shape. There is my little sketch done. Again, as another point of contention or debate, I'm going to give this church be a nice frame and then do let me know in the discussion what you think of these frames. Is this something that you think works for your work? I think for simple sketches and simple glazed watercolor sketches, often this little outline just provides a really nice touch. Doesn't always work and it's definitely not everyone's taste. But for me, it's a really fun way to finish off a sketchbook image like this. Anyway, that's all from me for this scene. If you joined me in the last lesson we'll have a little talk about what I'm going to suggest for your final project. 13. Summary and Thanks: So we are done and well done everyone. Thank you for sticking with me. I hope you've enjoyed that. I hope you've learned something. Most of all, I hope you've taken a little bit of inspiration, even if it's just one idea. Have a think about what that idea is and how you can use it for your class project or in the other projects; the other things that you enjoy creating and making in life. If you've enjoyed it, please do leave me a review. It means the world and it really helps spread the word and I let people know what they're in for when they click on my classes. I'd also love for you to connect with me here. Either follow me, ask me some questions, or find me on my other socials like Instagram, YouTube or on my website and all of those are listed up here on the screen now. Anyway, thank you so much for clicking, for following, for watching and I hope you've enjoyed and happy sketching.