Urban Sketching Outside - An Absolute Beginner's Practical Guide

1. Introduction: In this class, we're urban sketching outside and that's why I'm outside with all these lovely bird noises around me. Now, urban sketching, of course, most usually does mean sketching outside. It means sketching the world around us, going for a lovely walk and finding the sites that we enjoy or the places we like being and sketching them, putting them from our minds, from the world on to our paper. Now, that comes with loads of challenges though. How do we get comfortable? What do we take with us? Do we sit? Do we stand? And how do we really find our scene? When we find our scene, how do we work out, what from our scene goes onto the page? Loads more questions besides that. But don't worry, we're going to cover all of these questions and more for this absolute beginners class in urban sketching outside. Now the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take a little walk around and we're going to think about why we're urban sketching and the challenges and perhaps the frustrations with trying to find a scene that really seeks what we want to do today. We will literally talk through how to get comfy, how we can make due with the view, or make due with a not so brilliant scene, but still have a good time. I'll show you all the supplies I'm bringing out today, and as a little spoiler, is not much the joy of getting outside and sketching is to bring some lightweight equipment and just do what you can with what you've got, rather than being lumbered around with huge amounts of stuff that you need to bring every time. Of course, we'll do some sketching. We'll talk through the idea of thumbnails, why they're so valuable outside. But we'll also look at doing a quick and fun and vibrant scene of a local church that I happened to walk past today. In all of this, the message is, we're outside, have fun and enjoy it. Forget perfection and just enjoy getting your scene, your world onto your page. Now if you enjoyed this class, you can also find me, at tobysketchloose on Instagram, YouTube, and of course, you can follow me here on Skillshare, where I have loads more classes. Those who love you to leave me a review. You can do that by clicking below the video, pressing the Review tab and just simply saying, create review. Takes only a minute. It's the most amazing way of giving me a compliment or giving me feedback and helping me improve for future. Now with all of that said than done, let's get sketching. 2. Expectations - Let go of perfection: When we first set out to go sketching we can have this view of this perfect day with perfect seat we're going to find next to this perfect view in this perfect sketch that we'll create. I'll tell you now that in sketching outside nothing ever goes to plan, but that's what makes it so much fun. Instead of endless perfection, there is endless opportunity for experimentation and for opportunity to learn and do something new. Because we can't really ever do exactly what we want to do. Now, it's easy to say don't get frustrated but what I suggest instead of getting frustrated is set your expectations [inaudible] and you're going to enjoy the day of being outside. Maybe it's outside in a coffee shop, maybe it's outside in the country, maybe outside in a traditional urban scene. Having a walk and just looking and being there, being present in the day. As you start looking around you'll find more and more opportunities to sketch. You might find there is a really beautiful chocolate box scene that you want to sketch but unfortunately there's nowhere to sit or stand where you're not in the way. But then you turn around and there might be a fascinating tree or a really beautiful scene involving a telephone pole or a lamp post or something which is just a little bit abstract but actually is so easy to make interesting and actually is something you would never have thought of doing from a photo. The other thing I'd say is when you're out and about take some photos you can always use them to sketch from in the future or when you get home. It's fine to explore your day, explore the world around you from your photos. You were there and you can then sketch from those memories as well as the memory enhancing picture that you took. Rule Number 1 or step Number 1 is when you set out in urban sketching is set your expectations you're going to enjoy the day, but not that everything is going to go well and be perfect. 3. Your Project - Feel Confident Outside: For your project, what I'm going to suggest you do is you go outside and you start sketching. You just find a simple scene and you don't aim for perfection, but you get something of that scene the same essence, and your feelings about the scene on the page using some of the techniques perhaps I've used or using your own favorite techniques. Now, that might feel scary. A few tips to make it feel more accomplishable. Firstly, think about when you're sketching if it's nice and quiet or perhaps if it's inside like in a cafe. You might feel a bit more safe, less like someone's going to come and approach you and make you feel embarrassed or what you're doing. The next thing is just remember what you're doing. Most people will be amazed. You sketch. You brave enough to sketch outside and they won't charge you for that except to come over and complement. My last tip about how to feel more comfortable outside is perhaps take a friend or if you don't have a friend who likes sketching, take a dog with you, just some company to make you feel more protected and more confident. If you don't have any of those, then an amazing option is to look up your local urban sketching group. There's bound to be one near most of you, not everyone, but near most of you. These are really friendly groups which love having anyone of any ability come and share their sketching talents. Of course, when you've done your sketch, take a quick photo, pop it up in the class gallery. You can do that by clicking on the link below the video and just pressing "Create Project." It'll be amazing to see loads of different scenes and different parts of the world up in the class project gallery. I look forward to everyone sharing their projects. 4. Find a Seat/Get Comfy: Where should we sketch? My number one rule when we're sketching outside, is be respectful, be mindful of other people. For example, as I take my walk around today, I'm in a lovely little village which has got a lovely church. I want to sketch this church. That's what I've set in my heart and my soul onto today. I come into the church yard, but I'm not going to go and sketch standing on the path in the way of other people. I'm not going to go and sketch standing on the graves or sitting around the grave. Because for me that's just not respectful. We have to just set our own boundaries, and say what we think is appropriate. Once we've started with that mindset of being respectful, suddenly the world will open up and we can take a lovely wandering around and find all sorts of opportunities. Obviously, when we're out and about looking for somewhere to sit, this one thing we are all looking for. I just want to do a little cutaway and I'll show you exactly what that is. Something like this. A real life chair in the wilderness. Now obviously this is brilliant. We can set all our stuff up, we can sit comfortably and we can have a lovely view. But what's the problem with a real life chair in the wilderness? Well, often we don't really have a view. If you look behind me, I could draw these lovely trees, but I'm not going to be able to draw what I want to draw, which is the amazing church behind us. Back in the present day, we can keep wandering around and we can look for other solutions as well. Not everything has to be perfect. We don't have to find the perfect seat. What can we find instead? Well, we can find a lovely country patch of grass if your flexibility is enough to sit there, mine isn't. I look for little wall to perch on or as I said before, I've got a magic bit of care, a magic bit in my supplies, which is really cheap. Something I really recommend urban sketches to get so that you can always have a comfy seat wherever you are. 5. What do I bring?: Now when it comes to supplies, obviously what we want is things which we can just have with us, which are quick to use and easy to set up, easy to carry around. Ideally, the things which are so cheap and easy to have around, we can just have one set in every bag, that means whenever we have to move it, we can be sketching something because we've got a bag with us which has just got a magic set of sketching stuff. Today I'm not going to be using anything particular, I'm just going to be using a couple of pens and some watercolor pens, and a really simple mole skins sketchbook, not even a watercolor sketchbook, just a normal sketchbook. That's all we need. I've also got one magic bit of equipment which solves one of those problems, which we often have of not being able to find the seat. So you can see here everything that I carried with me from my day out sketching and it's really not very much. You can see one, for example, just a simple bottle of water. It's not huge. It's enough to both drink from, stay hydrated and sketch with. I've got my moles skin sketchbook. Really key part of this is just popping those two little binder clips on. We'll use those in our sketching and they're amazing for basically controlling your pages, not having to think so hard about controlling and preventing them flopping everywhere and this little pouches everything else that I might need. So we open up, we just have a little look at the things I've decided today are coming with me. It's really not a huge amount. What I've got, I've got two fountain pens, the red fountain pen it's got some soluble ink [inaudible] clear on it's got some insoluble and water proofing just gives me some nice options for different styles of sketching. If that's not what I want to do. If I want something more media, I've got a little few day pen. Now this is just a third option. Something else for a different style of sketching. Is not necessarily to have a load of pens, but I just like having different options so that whatever mood I'm in, I'll always be able to do something. Next you can see I've got six different watercolor brush pens with me. These are nothing clever. They're just a really quick and bold way of applying watercolor. Something different, really easy to use and we're standing up and I just thought, why not? We're getting out and about, why not just sketch something different to go with those just a couple of water brushes, really cheap nylon brushes, which basically will do whatever you want them to do really quickly, really loosely. Now the last bit of magic is here. Look at this. We just flip it open and our chair problems are solved. A really lightweight, really cheap stool is something amazing to pop in your urban sketching bags. 6. My First Sketch Today: Now that we have found our seat tool, in my case, brought my seat along and we found what we want to sketch in a place we can actually sketch it from. It's time to sketch. What we're going to do here is a really quick sketch because we're outside. We want to make it easy. We don't want it to start raining. We don't want the light to change and we want to have the energy to keep going and if we find more things, sketch them all. We're going to do, like I said, a really quick and loose sketch. I'm going to show you in this sketch how I approach very similar processes to normal, but using much lighter weight equipment all balanced down on my lap and still produce something really fun, really interesting, and something that we can be proud of. This is our sketch and you can see the little scene as a reference right in the corner. That's my exact view, that's what I'm looking at. Now, like the normal sketching processes I use just because we were outside doesn't mean anything is actually different, except all the things of course, which are different. What I mean is the sketching processes we can still think of as the same. I'm starting out now with my fountain pen. This has got some water-soluble and get some brown water-soluble ink. You could use any pen. It doesn't have to be water-soluble, it doesn't have to be water proof, just any pen or pencil. What am I doing? I'm finding those really key shapes in my scene. For example, I found the circle which makes the clock, I found a triangle which makes the porch. I'm finding the rectangle here, which makes the roof at the top. All we need to do is really simply find those shapes, that's our first challenge. Now, jumping straight in like this can be difficult. In some of the classes coming up, we'll look at ways to get around that, we'll look at measuring and we'll look at thumbnails, but often I'm anxious to just have set out on my big day out sketching, I just wanted to go. That's why we are doing our first scene so quickly, so straight away, but just think of your normal processes. Just because you're outside doesn't mean there aren't shapes, that's all we need to focus on in this first step. As you move around your image, you can refine things, you can add little details like the tops of the towers. You can find the bushes, the little extra details which are starting to make your image sing, but keep it at this stage. It's simple, just those tiny little extra things, not a heap of detail. Just like that, we're already done. We can move on to the next step. The next step is where we bring this to life a little bit with some tonal value. In my case, I've used water-soluble ink, I can now use water to provide that value. Value is basically darkness on the page. If the page is white, that's low value. Ink is black or brown, that's high-value. Having value creates shadows. Hopefully what you can see on the page is lots of shadows emerging on my scene. Those shadows make it turn from a series of 2D shape, step 1, into a series of 3D shapes like from a square into a cube and suddenly it feels more real. That's all we need to do really quickly. We've got some shape. Now, I'd like to splash on some colors, I've just got six colors with me. We're going to start with a couple of blues. What we need to do, we're using something like this or even with watercolors, just create some water on the page and touch your coloring. Then with a water brush. It's really easy to just push those colors around, push them and move them.You've got all the color you need on the page, so no need to even go back many times with your watercolor brush pen. You can see as well, we can use the same blues for bright skies, but also to make something else out of the shadows, to make the shadows less flattened, more interesting. Now, popping a little bit more water on the page, I can come back in with a different color. I've got my green, again just like we can touch it in. If we want, we could also basically draw with it, we can apply color to the page like a brush, maybe even create some textures, some brush marks where we suggest a few strands of grass. You could imagine this is a really quick sketch, but if you wanted to spend longer than me, you want to spend 20 or 30 minutes , you could keep going. Next, choosing something to emulate that stony field. I've got a nice bright bold orange in my sketching paper, which I put specifically actually thinking I might find an old church to sketch, sure enough, I did. With that lovely color, we can do a couple of things. One, we can do it on the page and watch it run, but two, look, we can use these brush pens like a watercolor pad, we can take our brush to them and we can pick up the pigment and just put it on the page like that, just as if all of these different brush pens were actually a set of watercolors. This is flexibility which makes sketching outside so much fun, when you don't have much with you, you end up having to work out how to use your limited set of equipment to still produce a fascinating, interesting, varied, and dynamic set of effects on your page. At the end, I add in a little bit of extra ink. That means whatever has happened on the page, and this is so true and outside sketching as well, because when you're outside loads of things can happen. You might have had to move out of the way of someone, so your watercolors around, you might have just had the light change, so you didn't notice that your watercolors were a bit different to what you imagined. There's loads of reasons why your colors might not have done exactly what you expected, but we can always come back with a little bit of ink and just make some extra marks to re-structure our image and that's what I'm doing now. I'm using our black ink or Baltic. This is waterproofing. I'm using that to go around my scene again. Where things worked, where do I need to move things or where can I emphasize things which seem important? We can go round the key areas and we can just make sure that they really do feel like they are currently existing on our page rather than just washing and moving and flowing around. It's again, a really quick process or it can be really long. It's really up to you. Obviously, to film a class. I'm doing here a really quick sketch, something that I can realistically share. I also think quick sketching for beginners is the most approachable way of doing it. I'm just dotting around a couple of details here, a couple of details there. If you do this and you produce something you're happy with outside, you'll have confidence for the next time and you can go out and just spend longer or do more complicated scene. It's all about just using your pen to have fun. Keep exploring that scene and just add these textures and these details, like the little, perhaps these little marks of tiles on the scene. We are getting this little slightly more fine details under the roof or even adding some random squiggles down below. Now, I always say this most importantly, don't forget to sign when you are finished because we are proud of ourselves [LAUGHTER] it's done to be proud of what you've done because it's a big thing to go and share your sketching like this. Now having signed it, I then of course decided, why not have a bit more fun? Why not explore a little bit more spontaneity? This is a nice idea if you do have watercolor pencils and watercolor pens. Don't forget there's loads and loads of ways to use them, just adding a few flicks like this might just elevate your image, just produce a little bit of extra texture. Now I really, I'm done. It's been wonderful sketching with really quick less than nine minutes, but so much fun. 7. Respect the Environement: I'm sure that this goes without saying. I'm sure that everyone here will, of course, be super respectful. But it's important to remember that us sketchers, we are good people. We are out there being creative, sharing our creativity with the world. Certainly it's very important to me that when we are done, we clean up. We leave our area like we found it so that other people can enjoy this lovely bit of cross, this lovely view, just like we had the joy of doing ourselves. 8. How to Measure Outside: This is a really short video where I just wanted to show you basically how to measure, how to get those angles, those lines and workout where they are. There's one really simple technique and that is literally by stretching your arm out, holding your pen, and finding the line. What we can do, we can literally put our arm out, holding our pen and we make sure our arm is nice and straight. Pen in the end, just like I'm doing in this clip here. Then you line up your pen with, say in this sketch, it was with the edge of the church. Now that we've lined up our pen with the age of the church in real life, we can then bring that line down and we can put it on our page. If we keep our arm straight, we keep our pen in the same orientation, we have a perfect line, a perfect angle without any fuss. The other thing we can do is we can measure using the same technique. If we put our hand up with our pen, what we do this time is we hold it and we put our thumb along the pen. We can see how far and how long the object is in terms of one pen, half-open, a third of a pen. We can compare that measurement to other measurements in our scene. By doing that, we can look and be accurate on our page even with really complex and challenging structures. 9. Moving On - Thumbnails!: One of the absolute hardest things when we're outside, is working out different things about our scene. One of the things is about exact composition. Our eyes have this enormous range of vision, 180 degrees, whereas a camera and we take a photo, suddenly we just have this perfect composition already that we can just copy. But we can't do that from our eyes, we have to work out our composition ourselves. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is with a thumbnail sketch. Sometimes, especially when we're outside, maybe we want to sketch this bump here, but it seems so far away, and we're not really sure how our composition is going to work. Now, this is where thumbnail sketches come in handy. Really quick, loose sketches where we gather the essence of the scene, but also work things out, work out the composition, work on the details, perhaps the shadows. Let's have a look with this scene, and how we might go about doing that. I've pushed myself now on another little wall, and I've got my camera, of course, filming over my shoulder. You've got a bird's eye view of exactly how I'm sketching, how I'm approaching this scene that we saw down the road so far away. What are we going to do? We're going to do two little thumbnails. Now, thumbnails are really quick studies, really quick sketches where we just get the essence of a scene. In this first sketch, I'm going to try using my waterproof marker, when all black marker. What I'm doing is I'm just seeing firstly, how do all the shapes fit? I'm just really quickly finding the big shapes of the buildings. The front's like a rectangle. The top is like a parallelogram. The side there's a flag with a square, and then coming across the other side is a hedge. Where are the shadows? Where can I just use a little bit of shadow to get some more 3D shape? Finally, those little shapes, things like the windows, the door frames, the sign. If I chose to sketch this from here, as a more cultured full-length sketch, what might this seemed like? We just do a really quick thumbnail sketch like this, and we start to get a real appreciation for all the little bits of pieces we might want to add. Now, this whole sketch takes me less than two minutes. That means that we can use it to experiment, we're not too sucked in. Now that I'm going to experiment, I'm going to take my learnings from that. I'm going to bring out my soluble mark, and this mark has got brown ink which is water-soluble. That means we can perhaps refine some of these shapes. I can get more of the windows and doors, and I got them the wrong size before, so I didn't get all the details, and now we can correct that. I've also made the path a bit smaller, because I recognized I wanted more of these bushes off to the right of the image. Again, just because I've changed into a really quick small thumbnail sketch, I have now been able to produce myself two lovely sketches, and enjoy my diao, and perhaps prepare myself for a bigger sketch. That's the real value of doing these thumbnail sketches. As I continue, you might see a few other subtle little changes like getting a bit more contrast, bit more darkness, being more confident in the shadows the second time. Then being able to even come in on that water-soluble ink with a bit of water, and just start thinking, if I had color, how might I approach this? If I made this into a bigger sketch, how might my important colors act on the page? This is the real value of doing these tiny little very quick thumbnail sketches. To have fun, to prepare yourself for the big sketch to come at the end of your day. 10. Sketching Whilst Standing: Of course, when we've done our thumbnail sketches often we might go, you know what? This was good, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. Don't forget, we are mobile. We don't have to stay with our lovely single seat or the one place we find. We can move and we can explore a different challenge from the same scene. We can move and find another place to settle, stand perhaps. In this little video, I'm just going to quickly show you how I might approach a sketch standing up and how that might change a whole load for you about how you can tackle all sorts of different scenes without needing to find the perfect patch. I've moved just down the road, now we're at this lovely viewpoint, a very different viewpoint but the same scene. What am I going to do? I'm going to do the same sketch, but just from this different compositional viewpoint. Using a fude pen this time. As you can see, it's just standing up, balancing my sketchbook and my pen in my hand. Even like this, we can still capture these lovely, loose, and simple sketches. Now, all we do, we just focus on what are the key bits for us. For me, I'm assuming no problem. I need to make this simple and stood up. It's not going to be a perfect sketch. It's not going to be a detailed sketch because you can see it's quite hard to keep our hands steady. But that's fine. If we really want to sketch this even, all we've got is our own two feet to stand on and nowhere comfortable else to be. Great. Let's just do that. That's what I say. We'll make two, we'll stand up, we'll hold things, we'll balance, and we'll find our shapes. In finding our shapes, we'll create something very fun, very beautiful. This is our scene just developing in front of this. Although the thumbnails are from a different angle, of course, we can still use those thumbnails to inform us, to remind us of the details which are important. This pub's could be eight bells. I felt one thing which will be fun would be to get the eight bells. They've got them on the side, they've got them on the front of the building. Let's get our eight bells. That's just something I felt was important. They didn't have to add these details. You can make your sketches when you're stood up, slightly uncomfortable outdoors, really simple. On the left-hand side, I've got to be hedged in my viewpoint and that hedge gets a nice bold line. And then that boldness, that contrast, that's something which is really fun with a fude pen. You can create those bold contrasting lines. This is a really great way of quickly making a simple sketch really interesting, having that basic shape, and then enhancing it with contrast. Like many of my sketches, what we're doing is we are going through the same sensible little step-by-step processes. We've gone shapes, now we've gone details and adding in some extra fun, extra punch with contrast. We can just keep moving around. Great. We've got our initial scene down, so why don't we just start adding extra bits which seem interesting. Trees in the foreground, trees in the background, the pavement, a few little textural lines. Now it's time to add our color. This is where you can see I just keep things dangling around. Then if you noticed, I'll just do a little slow motion when I bend over there. What's that in my pocket? Yes, it is all of my watercolor pens. I'm not saying that stashing all your watercolor pens in your pocket is the optimum solution for everyone. But find what works for you, there will be a solution that works really well for you. Now to keep things light and loose, I just used my water brush again to pop a bit of water. We can see just how that water brush instantly amazingly just carries that flow, carries that pigment all over the page. Water brushes and having that really quick pigment just available in my pocket, such a simple way to create vivid and fun sketches outside. I'm going to just take in some cues from the scene in front of me and just really simplifying the colors. Again, look in my pocket, I know that in there I've got my fountain pens, I've got my water brushes. I have all of my equipment stashed around so that I know where I can just grab what I need to grab and just keep sketching. No first no five. I don't have my full studio and obviously, I've not got my filming rig and all of this. Nothing is perfect, but it's fine. I'm just doing really quick fun little doodle in some really gorgeous sunshine. We're just simplifying that the roof is a bright orange per, doesn't have to be real. I've got an orange with me and I want something punchy and bright and I'm simplifying my image. I'm going to use all of my six colors. I'm going to splash it on there and have a bit of fun. We can even then just move things around and again, using our lovely little water brush combined with these simple bold pigments, we can create a lot of lovely effects, movement. Really why would we need more, why would we even need a full set of colors for this technique? Again, just finding all the bits are stashed around different pockets and now looking for another color. Let's have some real fun. Let's pop something really bright and bold there. These watercolor brush pens are wonderful. There are different ways you can use them. Just as happy being used as we did in the previous sketch with popping them in water or puffing up brush directly on them. But also we can mix them together so we can get these golden yellow mixing with the green and mixing with the orange and just creating a whole heap of joy all over our page. Real happy, lovely, bright colors. Now you might have noticed there I dropped my fountain pen, no problem. We're still in one spot. Things are around us and just bend over, grab it. Now we can move on to what is typically most of my videos, that fifth step, that finishing touches where we can bring things back together with some bolder lines. Now just going round a really quick sketch with some lovely loose lines, adding some more texture to the roof, seeing where it is. It just want to get more contrast because it needs more structure. Simple things like hatching to add a bit of texture, adding those extra details. We didn't think of it at first, it was a classic, old-fashioned lump at the front of the building. Doing these little things, these little details, we can just build and build our scene. Now, let's say that I am tired or this sketch isn't going how I wanted it to go, someone stood in front of me or something else has happened, which means I'm done sketching as far as my mental state is confirmed. That's fine as well. I could easily have moved on before I started adding these extra bits of line where I could easily just move on and go to the next sketch, or go home or go and grab a coffee or some cake or whatever you need, depending on the time of day and how hungry I am. But you get the idea. We're mobile, we're agile. I'm having fun adding all these little details. I'm accepting this isn't a perfect sketch. This is a least sketch, this is a fun sketch. This is very much something for me to enjoy my day. It's not going to go on my wall. But I'm going to have fun doing it. I had fun doing it. I can affirmably say I had a lot of fun doing this. That's the message I want to get through this lesson. Not just it's possible to stand and sketch, but also it's possible to stand, sketch, have fun, and not feel tied down to the perfection of the scene to making it need to be amazing, need to be perfect. 11. Summary: Thank you so much for joining him with this interesting with very different class, all about sketching outside. Now I hope this has made you feel much more confident, giving you lots of ideas and also set your expectations for what you can expect if you get outside. Please do take part. Share your project. If you've enjoyed as well, please leave a review. Just click below, and to create a project, all you do is click the "Projects and Resources" button and then Create Project. If you want to leave a review, click "Reviews" and then leave, of course, a review on the side as well. It's been amazing, sketching along with you. If you'd like to join in with more of my classes, check out my profile on Skillshare, follow me. You can also find me @tobysketchloose or at tobyurbansketch on Instagram, YouTube, and on my websites. Thanks very much.