Urban Sketching in 5 Steps - Learn to Use Pen and Watercolour Techniques

1. Introduction: Hi, there. Are you looking to get started in urban sketching with your ink, your pens, and your watercolors. But you're not quite sure where to start. You want a simple process that will let your creativity run wild so you can focus on producing a beautiful image, but know that your foundations are solid, giving you the freedom to be expressive. If so, then this may well be the class for you. My name is Toby. I'm an urban sketcher, known as Toby urban sketch on Instagram, YouTube, and of course on Skillshare. My style is loose and expressive. It's all about being playful, having fun. I splashed my colors around. I produce some interesting and quirky line work. But it's all based in a simple process. Because I have my simple process. I don't have to think about it anymore. I just do. The thinking comes into how can I make this more fun? How can I make this more interesting? And I get to really enjoy the process and I get to be proud of all the sketches I produce. In this class. I want to show you my processes and give you all the tools you need to go out, start creating wonderful art. In the first step will be using a pencil to lay down our composition. We'll talk about the rules of composition, the Fibonacci spiral, the rule of thirds, but we'll make it relatable, easy, something that you can just put into practice straightaway. Next, we use our pens. We grabbed some beautiful line work. We start creating these textures and character. After that, we add some paint on a little bit of color. We can be a bit splashy and loose, but we're also using some pretty simple principles to make sure that our colors work and everything feels dynamic and interesting. Finally, we add those finishing touches, those beautiful little elements that just make everything come to life. I'm sure by the end, you'll have a really clear idea of how you too can start urban sketching, picking your scenes, producing them in beautiful little sketches in your notebook, your sketch book, or on some lovely watercolor paper, if you'd like to connect, please do follow me on Skillshare. I start a discussion, share your project, or you can find me at Toby urban sketch on YouTube, Instagram, or on my website. And with that, let's get sketching. 2. Supplies: What supplies do I typically use? Well, if you have a look here, you'll see everything that I typically use for my sketching and it's not a lot. And also it's very flexible. Now, let's just break that down and have a look at the individual elements. I'll explain why I've chosen these specific things and why and through the years, I've narrowed down exactly what I use. So firstly, there's the pencil and pen. Now I tend to use a mechanical pencil. If I use pencil at all, often I just go straight into the sketch. But a mechanical pencil fits really nicely in my pocket in a small sketching box, whatever. And it doesn't need extra things. So it's got the rubber and the top. It doesn't need sharpening and it produces a reliable and small faint line. Perfect going over in pen and watercolor later. My pen is a Lamy Safari fountain pen. This one's an extra fine nib. I also use a fine nib and sometimes a median nib. I do have fine liners and other things with other types of inking. But I just find a fountain pen more flexible and to be honest, bit more joyful to use. It's just really nice having something which is going to last you forever, that is yours. And you can really get to know inside the pan, I use something called Platinum Carbon Black Ink. This ink is waterproof and having waterproof ink is important whether you want to use a fountain pen, a fine line or another time kind of pen. It doesn't matter as long as the ink is waterproof. When it comes to brushes, there are loads of options. If you look above my head and behind my shoulder, you can see I have loads and loads of brushes, but I often just use a couple of. My favorite brushes are having a small round brush. This is a size six round brush. And having a couple of more Chinese style brushes which just hold water in a different way and apply pigment in a different way. So I've got a size two MOP, which is this one. And I've got a medium-sized Chinese brush, which is this one. You don't need a load of brushes. You can explore the kind of brushes which worked best for you. But these are the ones that I'll be using. Of course, no urban sketch is complete without a head of color. I'm most commonly, I used my watercolors here. So inside I have 14 colors. I've got a nice and messy palette. As you can see. I love sketching messily sketching loose niches. What I call a happy palette and messy palette is a happy palette. In the project description, I've listed all the colors I've got here. And as we go through the process, I'll explain as I use them, which colors I'm using in terms of the paper that I use on my soft and actually use a sketchbook. But if I'm producing something finished, a nice finished piece, I'll often use some paper as well. Today we'll be using this. This is watercolor paper. It's, it's cold pressed. It comes in a really big pad. It's just using grade. It's nothing special, it's nothing super expensive. I think that when we're sketching, it can be very easy to get focused on buying expensive supplies. But actually, the art is in the artist. We need supplies which are good enough that we don't need to go out and break the bank. And last but not least, there's a couple of little things which is easy to forget to mention. I use a bit of masking tape sometimes to pop around the edge of my paper, and that's what I'm doing today, produces a lovely border. When we take it off. I have a really big jugs when I'm sketching at home or in my studio, I sketch with a liter of water. What I'm out and about I make do with less because it's not easy to carry that much more to round. I have a nice towel, a towel which I can use instead of a kitchen roll. It's a little bit more eco-friendly. That's why I like using the towel. But again, if I have tissues, if I'm in a cafe, I'll often just use the tissues that come with my coffee. And that is everything I can imagine us needing and probably a whole lot more. So without further ado, I think we can move on and start looking at our process. The first step of which we'll be examining the idea of composition with our pencil sketch and looking at those rules of composition. 3. The Class Project: So the final project, well, what I'd love for you to do is produce your own urban sketch based on these five steps. Have a think about the composition than pop down your pen lines a couple of layers of watercolor. And then you're finishing little ball touches. Don't get too stuck in the process to be creative, have fun. You can choose my scene. I've supplied a reference photo in the class resources. Or you can of course, choose one of your own new neighborhood, your house, something in town that's been catching your eye recently when you're done, I'd love for you to share it in the class gallery. That means that we can all have a look. We can compare contrast and see that everyone following the same process will produce something remarkably different, but equally interesting. I also go around and I make sure to provide feedback and ask a few questions whenever someone posts something in my classes. So if you'd like to have the interaction and I'd certainly love to please do share your finished project. 4. Rules of Composition - Practical Guide: So composition, composition is one of those things which often we don't think about, it just happens. But if we do think about it, we give ourselves a much higher chance of success or image will instantly be better just for those few minutes, thinking, moving things around. And how can we do that? Well, use the rule of thirds and the Fibonacci spiral. And I'm going to show you with a couple of thumbnail sketches, how we use those for this image and how it informs our composition. So now we're on to step one of our process. In step one starts with little pencil sketch. We work out our composition. Now for the composition, we can rethinking about two important rules of composition. So I'm just going to start showing you these in my sketchbook here. So if I just make myself a nice little landscape box here, this is our thumbnail sketch. You may have heard of the rule of thirds if I just write up here. And what does that mean? Well, it means we divide our canvas or paper into thirds, so three vertically, horizontally. And that leaves us with this grid and also these crossing over points. The idea is that your focal point will sit on one or two of these. And perhaps there'll be a secondary focal point on another. And this is the easiest way to start thinking about your focal point and the flow through the image and how that guides the viewer around the image. If we take e.g. our factor here, we can see that, well, look this kind of horizon line, this silhouette of grassland flows nicely along this line of thirds. And then that will mean that our lighthouse can go along here and the little house can go here. And what we can do, we can just work out with a little sketch all these shapes and where are they going to fit and how are we going to manipulate things? I say manipulate things because we don't have to stick. We've got a reference or a scene in front of us. But were the artists were allowed to move things and change things. And one thing I'd like to think about e.g. with what we might change in this is if we think about the flow of the image. So this this horizon line is quite high actually, if we look at the actual limit, it's probably more like up here and it's quite flat. If we think about a different compositional technique. So here we got this rule of thirds. Well, let's think about the Fibonacci spiral. So the Fibonacci spiral is a literally a snail shell like shape, which curves around like this. And what we want when we've got this shape, because we want the focal point to be where the tightest lines or we also one. So if we put a lighthouse here, we want the image to flow. We want this, this is sort of natural way the ion will flow around the image. So we want things to bring us towards our focal point. So perhaps actually, if we look at this, what we want is for our landscape, two more Come down and then come up. So instead of having really flat landscape, we're going to manipulate it. We're going to just slightly change it. We can also just pick out, we can see that this landscapes, when it comes towards us, some very foreground landscapes. So we can pick out here a bit more detail which also follows this flow, this loan. We can create a two layered background. We've got the distant background and they're closer background. Now we're much better at following this flow of the image and we're still following that rule of thirds works on both these fronts. Now with this Fibonacci spiral, this could be any way round. So it can be like this. It could be flipped over, it could be the other way round of course. So it's just, it fits in one of these corners. And it enables you to just think about the flow of your image the closer the lines are together. So as these lines spiral in more detail and boldness you want in your image. The further out, the further apart these lines are, the less detail what we want. So this is a compositional techniques. And what we'll do now, we'll go into the next video. We'll use what we've learned about composition. We'll use our thumbnails. We will transfer that onto our piece of paper. 5. Step One - Pencil Sketch: Now step one, we've done a little fun now so we know what we want to put on a page, or at least we know where we want to put it on the page. Step one is about taking a pencil and our final piece of paper or final best TO of surface that we're gonna be creating our image on and applying the shapes. So we're thinking about arsine in shapes. Simplify it, get it done. Don't worry if it's not perfect because when we come back in step two, we can always shift and move things around a little bit with our Pen. So we've done this first half of step one, which is working out our composition. We've got those fundamentals in our mind. We've worked out the rule of thirds. We've worked out the flow of the image. Now, we've got our paper here, our final piece of paper, the same pencil. And we're going to apply the major shapes of the image onto this page. And this is a quick process, is not a slow long process. This should be nice and quick process. We can move things, we can edit things. When we come in at the pen, we can change things. So what we're gonna do, we're just going to take our basic elements and pop them down. Let's start with this foreground so that we can start thinking about that flame. We wanted it to sweep up instead of being flat, didn't we? Then we've got this other foreground which we're going to come in like this. And we can have that climbing through the image. Then if we just mark in very gently our rule of thirds, we can check where should our lighthouse be? Should be about here. So we're going to keep it in the right place or not image. And the lighthouse is just a series of shapes at the bottom, it's got like a rectangle. Then it is a, basically a triangle or a cone, isn't it? But the top has been cut off, so we can sketch that in. I'm just going to be fairly dark with my lines so you can see what I'm doing. But I advise you to be quite gentle so that you don't have to do too much rubbing out. On top, we've got another rectangle. And this rectangle and then a, basically a square with a little bubble. And then we can just mark in a couple of these other slight detail. So we're going to have the the railing come out. We can move to our house. What's our house? Our house is, it's got a rectangle at the front with a triangle on top with a parallelogram coming off here. This grasslands nudges up against it. Got a couple of little chimneys. And then if we go here, we've got these little bottle add sticking out, which will probably make a feature of at the end. Is there anything else? Well, let's just do a couple of reminders for ourselves. So it'd be nice to have some middle flowers poking up. This can be a foreground. So we've got more than just this wash of green in when we do the watercolors. You can also have these flowers coming in and providing little punches of color. Other than that, I think this is pretty much all we need to do. We've got these sort of framework marked in nice and neatly. And so I think we can safely move on to step two, where we will apply a little bit of ink. 6. Step Two - Pen Sketch: So we've got that pencil framework down and it's trying now to have firming up and I'm going to use my fountain pen, but feel free to use another pen as long as it's waterproof. What we're going to do, we're going to use that sort of skeleton, that framework. And we're going to apply our pen work in a loose and expressive way. Don't press too hard, don't create too bold a firm edge. What we want is some fun, some expression, some wonky lines to really make this, this image feel alive. Okay, so now it's time for our pen work. You can see the only bit I've done off cameras, I've rubbed out some of these compositional lines, everything else I'm leaving in. And even if you don't rub them out or you never had them, It's fine. Pencil has a way of disappearing behind everything else we're going to do. I'm going to start around my focal point. I'm going to hold my pen really loose. And we're going to wiggle and mobile. We're not going to be doing straight lines is it's very tempting to think. The only way to get a sketch good is to press hard, make sure that lines really bold and perfect. For me. That does the opposite. For me. Wobbling, going up and down lines that starts to generate texture. So what we're doing now is we're going up and down our lovely lines that we found with our pencil. And we're producing a texture filled interesting sketch. So these kind of wobbly lines are suggesting it's a bit older. They're suggesting it's made of brick. They're suggesting that it's a little bit grubby and you can see all of those things are true from the reference photo as sketches. We're not here to sketch or draw or paint every tiny detail. That's what the photos for. We're here to get the impression of the image down the impression of the place. So you just continue these little wiggly wobbly lines, getting these important shapes and then we can move and correct things. So I've moved the top, this ellipse, I've moved it slightly to the right because it's on reflection. That's where it should have been. Get this lighting. And there's this complex and meshwork here isn't there. But what I'll do, I'm going to just really gently sketch that kind of idea of a meshwork. But it's very loose, it's very delicate. And I probably won't do any more than that because we don't want it to overpower. You can barely see. It kind of looks until you look closely. It looks like there's nothing there. So don't over-invest, don't overdo it. Get down to this window. And we're just trying to make it feel free days. So 3D means drawing more than just a square. It needs extra lines, that needs extra planes. So you can see I've drawn a square and then I've drawn the inner edge. And I can even lacking the window a bit. Now it's got a really deep shadow inside. Now we can move down to our lovely house. And again, let's keep this lovely. We will wobble going. You can see in the pencil sketch, I didn't Jordan the chimneys, but that's no problem. I've noticed them now and I can add them in. This is where the pencil sketch doesn't have to be perfect. It's just really quick. And it's just some of these marks are there to remind us of things. And then to provide a scaffold. And now we're really looking, we're really sort of checking what's going on. And we can go round out the window. And again, do you see couple of lines, instead of just doing a square? Adding that extra line makes it 3D, but lacking in the window, it gives it that shadow. We can do the same here. You can block in and give it a frame. So black it in, give it a frame. Again. All of that and more is in the house portrait essence. If you want to know more about real details like this, check that out. This, this class is more about the general feeling and going through our process. So continuing just to work around. Now you can see we have taken our shape all the way to this foreground. The foreground, I'm going to work out in to out because I want to get that flow right. I want to feel that Fibonacci flow. You don't have to get the exact line that has suggested by reference photo. We can do our own thing. So again, Weebly wobbly in this time. My wobbles are aiming to pretend to be grass or these little textures which are popping up above the, above the horizon or above the lip of this graph anyway. But as we get further away, these little marks would be less and less because they want to be less and less obtrusive. We want to be drawing the flow this way. So gentle lines, sketchy lines lead to bolder lines. And that brought, brings our eye up to our focal point. And that again, that's our composition. Then we've got this other layer that we decided on. Why not add in some of these flowers? There are hundreds and hundreds, probably uncountably hundreds of flowers in the reference. But we can add a few. And we can use those as a reminder for ourselves. Later in the color that we're going to add simple punches of lovely flowers. The flowers can be above and they can be below. We just get again that flow. We're getting that flow. We were sort of moving the line as we feel it should with the reference in mind. But the reference isn't ruling what we do. Equally, we can get an extra layer of foreground. So we can bring in just a couple more extra flowers, just sort of poking their head, or even just a few scratchy little lines to come and be passive graph. We can also create just a bit more shaped by just bringing down some lines which kind of break up this, this big blank space. And when we come to a color, we can use these lines to make the colors float as well. You can do the same over here. Again, getting more loose and scratchy in the distance because you see now how this flow works. If you imagine the spiral coming around like this and leading here, as you get closer and closer to this point, there's more and more line. There's more and more bringing your eye in. And is there anything else we really need to do? Well, the last thing I'm gonna do is I'm just going to come up and down these lines a bit more. I'm not pressing hard. I'm doing the same loose line up and down to make it bolder. And then we can just provide a little bit more texture as well as get some nice smudgy bricks that you can see. We can mark them in as textures on our lighthouse. Then I really do think we're done. So how long was that? Just about 6 min of sketching. To go from a pencil sketch with pencil framework to really interesting bit of pen work. And then next week we'll be doing, is getting our watercolors out using a couple of brushes to create some loose and dreamy colors. On top. 7. Interlude - Getting Set Up to Paint: So a brief interlude about how I set up for my colors. Firstly, what I've got under my drawing board, a little bit of masking tape and I pop it down. And that means my drawing board is at an angle. So it's like this. If this is the desk, my drawing boards like that, that means my colors will flow down. I've got a really big pot of water, and I got my watercolors. And you can see my watercolors are messy. And the reason they're messy is because I like knowing which colors here a rich I can take some red and put it on the page. Also, I can go all, let's put some red with this blue and make a purple. I can find things which have happened in my palette and make use of them. And we'll do a bit of that, especially for the sky and the greens. We'll be taking a bit of fun from the palette, putting it straight down here. But that is essentially at, that is how I get set up. So get set up yourself, give yourself plenty of space, a little bit of an elevation, even just using an old roll of masking tape or whatever. We're just holding it, holding up your sketchbook with your hand. And then we can start our beautiful colors. 8. Skillshare 5 Steps Step Three: So step three now we are getting on colors out. Now, I love using a reasonably big brush for this first layer with a lot of water, really loose, really happy colors. Let those colors paint themselves. And if you don't know what that means, don't worry, I will be showing you in this class. So we're going to start with our colors. Now. I'm going to use my biggest brush first. And I, I like starting with the sky. I like starting with water for this guy. So I opened with getting my water. I'm going to say neatly, but it's not really neatly, but getting it splashed around that lighthouse. And why do I like doing this? Why am I putting so much water on the page without any watercolors? And I think the answer is so beautifully demonstrated. I'm going to take some moon glow. And that's because if you see this moody sky, there's this big cloud at the top. I'm mingling will be perfect for that. You could use a different color of Payne's gray or mixing neutral color with say, a burnt umber and ultramarine. Now with my moon glow, which I've taken quite wet, quite a lot of water, but also lots of pigment. If I just put that in my water, I get cloud shapes. I get this dreamy spreading sky. What I like to say is, Why would I paint? When my watercolors are happy to paint for me? Look at that sky coming down, it's giving that effect. It's almost like rain, isn't it? But it's giving you these effects which we can't necessarily do ourselves. Maybe we can, but they take an awful lot of effort. And actually watercolors are more than happy as I like to say, as I just said, to paint themselves. So let them, let your watercolors paint themselves. This is the unique magic of watercolors. No other medium, no other kind of pain will happily move and paint itself like this. As you can see, we can move things around so we can respond to them. So we can soften the top. Maybe we want to fill up a page with color. I'll leave a few little white gaps because I think that's important as well with watercolors having a bit of light in the page. We can push the pigment around, we can come in and we can drop more if we think it needs to be a bit more intense somewhere, we can splash in and that will create different textures. Underneath all of that. Very moody, interesting sky is kinda sliver of hope, isn't it? We've got this, this blue, so I'm going to use a cobalt blue, any sort of nice bright blue we'll do though. So don't worry about all these specific colors. I'm just letting you know because people often want to know, but use what you've got and use. Cerulean blue would also create a nice cool, crisply and is often in those sort of watercolor sets you, you can find. And you see how just by popping in and giving it a little flick, it's painting itself. It will even paint itself up a bit. It won't be as dramatically going up because it's not got gravity on its side, but it's gonna go up a little bit. Then we've got this interesting cloud in the middle. I'm going to touch in a few bits of blue to make us feel sort of more unified. But we've already got, I mean, that's a fun, dramatic skies in it. There's no arguing that that's, that's watercolor has done its job. It's done what I paid it to do. And what's next. So now we're gonna move into our foreground. And I'm going to be adding these lovely greens. Now I've got a agreeing I like called cascade green. You can see it in my palette here. And I'm going to use that as a nice mellow green. You could equally use a, just a simple green that you mix with a blue and yellow and you can change the green by adding more blue or yellow, or even adding earthy tones like browns and things. For me, I love this because my cheek green and it creates a nice texture. What I'm doing is I'm doing the reverse process. I'm getting this green in, in a few places. I'm trying to paint around my pockets of light, which are these little flowers we're going to have. And then I'm going to come in with some yellow. Because yellow and green. Green is made of yellow and blue. So adding yellow will lighten our green. This yellow I'm using is quinacridone, kind of like a golden color, like the light is coming down. I'm going to bring that up to our sky, where our sky is going to bleed in a little bit in places. And it can feel scary. This it can feel like, oh, I'm not in control. But you aren't, to be honest, but you sort of, are you still the one who's guiding watercolors? He's responding to them. But again, by letting these colors meet, not everywhere, but in a few places, you'll be giving them the opportunity to paint themselves into these wonderful texture. Just by doing that, by popping in two colors. A third one by meeting the sky and the greenery, we get this really beautiful varied wash and we can do the same process as the sky. We can come in and we can touch in other pigments that we want to be there. We can plop in water or we can even dry our brush off and come back and scoop out pigment. Do you see how I can e.g. if we wanted to, I could scoop out a lot of the pigment in this back layer. Now will the intensity is sitting in the foreground. And that again fits with this flow. We've now got this line, this line of less pigment, which brings our eyes up to our focal point. A couple more touches of yellow just to start these ideas of flowers, and we'll finish off those ideas of flowers in the next stage. Then the last little bit, the last bit for this really loose stage of watercolors or with our sketching is to add a little shadow down here. And how are we going to do the shadow? Well, let's use colors we've already used. So let's take our moon glow. Let's mix it with a bit of blue, so we've got a slightly different tone. So I'm just gradually mixing the two together. And then I can choose from my palette, which I prefer. I prefer the slightly more blue tone. Then we can bring that slightly different shadow tone all the way down or lighthouse here. And we can find the other shadows, which is this roof. And then here do you see how that's blending with the sky? For me, that is absolutely wonderful. Now if you don't like that effect, what you're going to need to do is either wait while so that things are dryer or you can leave a little white gap between the two. For me, I loved the blending effect, so that's part of my sketching aims normally as to blend and bleed things together. I'm just going to soften this edge a bit. So I'm just taking some water and you see how they're touching a little bit of water in. Instead of having this hard shadow, we now have this gradual shadow coming across. And we can reintroduce the holidays later if we want. Because that is step three done. So now we need to let this dry and we can come back again with our watercolors. Next, it'll be with a smaller brush, my size six round brush. So get yourself ready with a smaller brush if you've got your watercolors and a dry piece of paper, and we'll be moving onto step for creating those bold, punchy colors. 9. Step Four - Bold colours: So step four now in step four is all about bringing out a little bit more boldness, bit more shaped with our colors. We want our page to be mostly dry. Doesn't have to be entirely dry, but mostly dry. So if you just move on from step three, perhaps have a five-minute pause, go make a coffee or a decaf drinkers, It's the evening. And then we will get started with this little step, building up our colors and having a bit of fun. Okay, so we're back and we're mostly dry. So here's my little size six brush. And let's just move on to the next interesting lines of color. I'm going to start now in my lighthouse, because a lighthouse is what's going to set the tone really, isn't it? The intensity of color or shade or value in the lighthouse is what will inform us about the rest of our sketch, how much color and punchy can give it. So a lot of this is just about shadow. So I've got my moon glow and we're gonna be a little more careful this time. Still a bit loose, but also nice and careful. And we can bring down this time perhaps a hard shadow. Let's try just a nice firm shadow. We can bring it into these other places as well that we identified before. We can make that shadow a bit more varied so we can take a bit of that blue again. We can drop it in, in a few places, perhaps using more of a blue shadow to separate the roof and the building as well. We don't want it all totally hard edge. So I'm going to also just come in in a few places, often at this time. So instead of softening everywhere, this time it's just gonna meet in a few places. And the other way that we can make it feel software is by just bringing some of these texts as across. And we've got these sort of grubby lines, haven't we? So we can bring those grubby lines across. Then if we go up the top as well, all of this is rather dark and we can bring that out. We can surround our light with a bit of darkness. Since we know that's a light, we can also have good, have fun. So why don't we just take, I'll take the same yellow, the quinacridone. Why don't we give for light, a little glow, just a gentle glob inside the lighthouse. Then underneath we're back to having rather dark colors. So Here we go. No problem all done. And we can also just bring down some of this meshwork as well if we want with our brush. Just in a couple of places, it makes things feel a bit more unified. Now, I love, as I said before teen some splashes said in the intro belief and unsafe for me, a few splashes. Just again, it breaks up those shapes and it draws the eye. And it gives us a bit of information about how much splashy color we can do elsewhere. And that is basically our lighthouse done. We might do few other touches, but we'll wait and see on that. And we are of course going to come back some finishing touches. Perhaps a bit of pen perhaps, and punchy color in the last section. Now this foreground. Okay, so what have we got? Well, let's take our green and this time, again, using our small brush. And remember how I said we could use these lines to shape our color a bit. Well, we can literally pops in color under those lines. We can put some water on our brush, make it clean, and we can soften that, move it around, blend it in. Now we've got these bumpy areas and it's suggesting lumps and sort of real movement. We can touch him some of our, our yellow again and move it around and again, whilst this is all wet paint, we can splash and this time I'm just splashing water and that water will create very real textures. Feel free to experiment as well. We're just moving your brush in and out of that. You see how that creates these lovely texture in the background. You can use circles and the water and pigment will flow along. I'm just have a go at doing these little, funny little movements and flicks. And you could try this, this kind of thing as well in a, in a thumbnail sketch if you wanted. There we go. And we've now got these lovely layers separating themselves out into the foreground. We want that intense color. So we're going for green. And we using these shapes again to direct where our colors going. This time we could split our color between different shapes. So we've got this sort of shape of green. This shape which is more of our quinacridone, more of a yellow. This shapes greening n. Then perhaps you want to leave some of them like, so we'll leave this as a nice bold bit of light and work our way across. We still managed to leave these lovely little flicks of freedom. The lovely flowers, which we can add a punch of color to at the end as well. It can be nice to add a little bit of shadow in. So if I just kept my nice shadow color my moon glow again, and drop it in a few places. It just a bit more realistic because in reality, there are loads and loads of shadows going on in here as well. There we go. So we've got this kind of more real punchy lighthouse. We've got this nice layer of color, a bit more sort of going on there. Now, before we go, before we finish, I'm going to do some splashes in here, some yellow this time. And that yellow is starting off those effects of having flowers because it's still wet on wet hair. Do you see how they're already bleeding out, these little bits of yellow already bleeding out. We can also touch it in if we want to be more careful, we could just really gently touch. You see how as we touch it in the brush leaves a tiny bit of pigment behind. And we're getting this effect of flowers in our scene. Now, I'm going to let that dry. So that is our step four done. We're almost there. And step five will be on this. Now nice and dry, adding in some really intense color and bringing things together with some line work which just pulls in those shapes. Do you see where we're not quite met the line and the color will be fixing that in a moment. 10. Step Five - Finishing touches: All my stair step five. Step five is where everything just comes together. We can take our pen back, we can create a few more interesting marks. We can capture some shapes which maybe has gone a bit skew. If when we did our original panel with our colors spreading in places we weren't expecting. And then with our colors, we can add some really bold, bold highlights or deep shadows or perhaps bright colors and a few splashes because I always love a few splashes. So we're back and how do you think it is looking? I think it's looking alright. I quite like it. It's important when we're judging our own art to take a step back, look from further away, even take a photo and look at the photo. A bit of space away from the art, takes your attention away from all the tiny imperfections that you know are there. And actually, if you saw someone else's version rather than your own, I bet you'd think the little imperfections were on purpose rather than little happy accidents. And when they look like they're on purpose, they look like artistic genius rather than mistakes. So now I'm going to take my pen and we're gonna be doing a sort of redo some of our lines. So some of these key lines just go back along them. Don't lose that texture. Don't lose that lovely, we believe wobbly line. In fact, if anything, make it even more wiggly, wobbly. And now what we can do, we can find where these colors escaped or missed. So where we've got these little white areas, we can go round it and look. That makes that white area looked like it was on purpose. In a sense, it was, I try and leave these lovely white areas because I know the effect they will bring and I know the effect when I come back with my pen that will be left by encapsulating them. So it's not a lie. It's just a bit of creative freedom. That's why I tell myself all the time. Anyway, we're just continuing along. So we recapturing this line. Again, all up here, we've got a little bit of light, which doesn't work because that edge is supposed to be shadow. But if we capture that light with a pen, suddenly it's the light. Glancing off the top of our graphs. We can come down these textural lines we added as well, and we could do the same thing, just capture those areas of light and shadow. You see how this just brings things together and it, it makes everything just work. It creates more noise on the page, but noise, which is the textures you've been building up. So don't worry, any of the other stages. If it's not yet looking finished, it's really not supposed to. It's only now for me, at least it's only now when this kind of starts looking really good and I started thinking, Oh wow, this is, this is actually working well done me. Even our flowers in the front. We can capture again, these leaves. We can capture, we can start giving them some real contrast as well. This is the foreground, remember, so we can give it a silhouette by really blocking in some of those colors here as well. And maybe a couple more leaves blocked in here, and there isn't much left to do in the foreground. Now let's, let's leave it because there's a real risk sometimes overdoing it, going too far and you can't take back with pen or with watercolors. So stop, move elsewhere. Come back if you need to. We can do the same thing now with our lighthouse. We're going to go up and down. I'm not pressing harder. And you see how my life has gone very wobbly there because it caught on the paper, that's fine. It just adds to that wobbly, interesting aesthetic. If you don't like that, Well, it's happening now. And it's part of all my sketches, these kind of wobbly lines which go a bit wrong. And if you'd gone really wrong, if we'd gone way off, well, I just introduce another one so I could even do that. I could just introduce these kind of flux coming off elsewhere. And suddenly that first one was on purpose because I've done it elsewhere. How could I have done it wrong so many times? And it's adding sort of aesthetic qualities, adding that interesting expressive idea that loose urban sketching style do the same with these little lines where we've got our chimneys, we can block in an edge and then It's got some nice light shining off it. Same over here. And we can come and now we can finally add the little things we said we were at the beginning and we can do the same. We can turn them into a 3D object by giving them a deep shadow. There we go, and isn't much else left to do? Well, probably not with the pen is that I think we've, we've achieved what we set out to with our pen work here. So what can we do with our brush? Just my last few touches. Well, let's take quinacridone again. We're going to do a little bit in these flowers. And I'm using the quinacridone now, there's an almost toothpaste consistency. I want to leave a bit of white because I want these flowers to stand out. So by having them have this toothpaste consistency, really dark quinacridone with a whiteout line. It's obviously very different to what's happening before. Now, I'm going to make an argument, argument here. And I shouldn't argue, but I'm going to that you could invent colors. So for the sake of argument, I'm going to take a nice bit of scarlet lake, a nice red. I'm going to introduce some red flowers as well. And that's going to really contrast and pull the eye along this line. Then we're going to see in a moment one of the problems with that. And then we can work out how we can fix that problem. So the problem now, do you see it, your eyes drawn down here? Because that's the only place with that color. There's only one little area which has got this one color. And using one color is a bit dangerous. We can fix that with a couple of splashes. So now it's in a few places and also these red flowers or in a few places. But we also can fix it more effectively by just inventing a couple of red areas elsewhere. So why not make these chimneys where it might not make one of these just standing up bread and wine, not even pop a little bit of red around the lighthouse, give it a splash as well. There we go. So now the eye is no longer drawn specifically to this red. It's now got this warmth which pulls it all around the image. And that's it. That's it, it's done. So we've done some really interesting stuff here. I hope you've enjoyed the key, the most important vet about all of this is to be proud and part of being proud for me is popping my signature on. And I can of course now unveil it. So let's just take off that paper, the masking tape, off the paper and see what we're left with. And you can see as I remove it, you get that beautiful, crisp edge. It's a page full of life, full of color. And when you suddenly have that little whitespace around, That's another way of getting space from your image and going, Oh wow, It's alright. So I'm really happy with this one. I hope you're happy with yours. I hope you've learned a few interesting bits and pieces. Let's just move on to the next lesson now, which is a little wrap up little thank you. And a consideration of the next steps. 11. Thanks and Summary!: So thank you. We are done. Amazing work. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys have done and please share your project in the class gallery. I will, of course, put mine up and I'll keep you updated if you want to. Just follow me on Skillshare. And I'll use some regular posts and sending out little newsletters as well. I'd also love for you to find me on my other socials at Toby urban sketch on Instagram and YouTube. If you want to tag me there. If you produce a nice class project that you are proud of, please do. I'd love to see it. I love you to reach out. Most of all. I hope you enjoyed this class and if you're looking for your next steps in urban sketching, check out my Skillshare profile for loads more full length in-depth classes.