Urban Sketching with Pastels - An Exploratory Approach

1. Intro: If you enjoy exploring new media, creating vibrant and bold sketches, and just learning by having fun, then this is the class for you. Today, I'm going to be using some pastels, but not any old pastels. We're going to be using water soluble pastols to create a really fun, happy and alive urban sketch. Through a step by step approach, where we will just create some art, I'm going to show you all the different techniques that I use and I use these pastols inside in my studio, but also outside when I'm on holiday and when I just want to relax, and that is exactly what I think this process and these tools are wonderful for. If you don't have these exact pastels, it doesn't matter. In the supplies lesson, which is coming up as the next video, I'll show you a few different alternatives you can use from common wood colour pencils through things like ink tense blocks. If you've seen any of my other classes, feel the structure is very similar. We're going to enjoy ourselves, we're going to be creating art. Along the way, I'm going to give you lots of hints and tips to make you feel comfortable and confident to go out there and do your own thing as well. By the end, you created something fun, something loose, something happy, a really cracking urban sketch using water soluble pastels or one of the alternatives which we'll talk about in just a second. 2. Supplies: I'm super excited to show you these pastols. These are Karen Dash's new color two aquel. They are water soluble wax pastils or water soluble crayons depending on what terminology you want to use. You can see they come in all sorts of vibrant colors, and that's what we're using in today's class. Now, of course, if you don't have these, there are other brands of water soluble pastels. You can also do many of today's techniques using soft pastols and a bit of water or even things like watercolor pencils. If you want to join in and you don't have exactly these, then don't worry about it. Just make sure you're using something water soluble and you'll be able to have fun. Now one tiny little note here, we shouldn't confuse these with these, which look almost identical. These are Karnashs new color one. The only difference is that they say new color one and they've got these little dots on. Now these are pastels which are not water soluble. Many of the techniques we're using, we can't use with these. To sharpen my crayons, I'll occasionally use a simple pencil sharpener. That's something else I'm using. And all I need today is a water brush or two. These are brushes with a bit of water in the belly and then a simple nylon tip. You don't have to use a water brush. You can also use a normal brush and a big pot of water. Last but not least, we have some kind of sketchbook. This sketchbook is one of my favorites. I got lots of exciting fun things in here already, lots of ink, lots of watercolors, lots of doodles, and even little notes and things. Now this is quite good water color paper, but these crayons will work on any decent sketching paper as well. Just make sure it's reasonably heavyweight, something above 150 gram/square meter or about 70 pounds per meter. There you go. That's everything you'll need to have a lot of fun. 3. Lines : Now rather than taking you through a load of individual period lessons, what I thought we'd do in this class is we would look at an exciting scene. This is AC. You can download the reference photo in the class resources, and this scene is from MevGissi in Cornwall. We're going to use this scene and a series of little steps, bite size lessons to discover exactly what these pastels can do so that you can then go out and sketch anything with them. So if you get your pastels or your pencil, whatever you happen to be using, get them open, get them ready. Let's get started. Now, step one of our process is just going to be essentially drawing, doing some line work. For this, I just need a couple of nice colors, and I need them to be fairly sharp. I'm going to take this pink color, and I'm particularly choosing colors which are quite light because the light colors will fall back when we add more layers, more depth. I'm also going to choose this lovely violet color. Sharpen them enough. I don't want to waste too much of the pastel and that is what I'm looking for, little points. With our points, I can pop away the rest of my colors and we can just start off by doing some drawing. What I'm looking and we can just start off by doing some drawing. What I'm looking for in this is some big shapes. Look at this. We've got these big lines, these big marks. I'm just going to use my little pink salmon pastel here. Firstly, to do these shapes. If you've done any of my other classes, you'll know I love talking about shapes. In the front, we have these little sandwich board more shapes. And the tip here is, it doesn't matter at this stage, especially if you get things a bit all wrong or a little bit loose. In fact, you'll see that being a bit loose and a bit wrong might even make the rest of the process more fun. We're going to start off by just exploring the idea that we can use these crayons to draw. They go, I've drawn my big shapes. Now, I'll swap to my other pastel and there's not too much of a scientific approach going on here, apart from keeping a light color to start with, I'm not too worried about what exact color I'm using. I just use these colors because I like them. That is what I love about playing with new toys, playing with new media. Just getting to experiment. I really encourage you to use things like this as a highly experimental and fun medium. Here we go. Picking out more shapes, picking out here the smaller shapes, things like the windows and these interesting elements of our building, not just the big shapes, these big shapes, but also these interesting bits, bits which feel more like details. Notice how my lines are overlapping and intermingling and having a bit of fun on the page. That is the feel I'm looking for. Also doing lots of joining up of lines and just playful little movements of the pastels. That is going to help with a bit of texture later on. That, I think already is probably step one done, Ali drawing, which means we're ready to move on to step two in the next lesson we'll be adding some water. 4. Water: Step two then is, as I said, in the previous lesson, adding water. I'm going to just use this simple water brush. Now with this, I've got lots of water and I can squeeze it and that water can come out onto my page. You can see when I use this bit of water, I can activate what we've put down so I can blend and smooth these colors out. I can make these purples, move. I can mix them in with the salmons and we can soften everything out. Here, what I might start doing is looking, where have we got shadows? Got a lot of shadows. So the shadows, I might just apply lots of water so that those colors move and blend together and create what I hope will become a nice soft, interesting, shadowy aesthetic. Because we've kept it really simple with those shapes, we're going to get away with doing an awful lot of movement at this stage. All we're trying to do is give ourselves a basis, an underpainting is the feel that I'm going for here. And then we're going to be able to play with more and more of these ideas as we build up the layers, as we build up the complexity that's going on in our image. He just have a play. See what happens. You can get rid of lines. If you want to smudge them and move them out of the way entirely, you can get rid of them with a little bit of a gentle scrub. Just be careful you don't overdo things and damage your paper, keep it light with the brush. But start to build up that little aesthetic. Now notice I've left some white spaces. I love white spaces, not filled them with water, not filled them by movement. Like that, I've applied my first layer of water, ready to put the lid back on this and move on to adding some more of our super fine pastels. 5. Blocks: The brush is away, the pastels are back. And this. This is where we have a lot of fun. I've even had to roll up my sleeves, you see. We're going to dive in. We're going to look for colors we can see. We're going to invent some other colors as well. Let's just start here. We got obvious reds, haven't we? Nice. Interesting bricky reds. We are obviously limited in our colors to some extent by what's in in the box. They do mix and they do blend a bit, but primarily, I like using these for their vibrancy. Here's my take on these reds. We've got some reddy scarlety touches and a bit of orange. Now we can use the flat of these. We can use the nib like we did before to draw. We just block in a bit of color. Look at this beautiful pinkish tinge coming in. I'll just try the last of my reds as well. We can get away with adding lots, making it really interesting, really busy. And then move on. Don't fill it. Remember with the water. See how much we can move these pigments. So don't need to fill this whole area. We're just going to add a few representative colors and move on. What's next? Well, that's here. We've got this lacy blue. Maybe I'll make it a little brighter with this blue turquoise and we can even bring back actually what we're using before, this lovely color we used to do some drawing. With that, I'll do a couple of marks. And it's much softer color, isn't it? I'll leave a lot less pigment on the page and then move on. Here we've got this bright sunlight. I'm just going to do something really simple here. Take this bright lemon yellow and apply it a couple of marks because although it's white, I'm using this yellow to go white. It's actually sunshine, which is actually yellow, maybe even a little bit of orange in there as well. Next, we move down. We've got more of these shadows. Now, I quite like these shadows to be purples and lilacs and things. I think it feels really interesting doing that, and this is where we're moving further and further from reality. We get to play around. What colors do we have? What vibe do we want? Maybe you want to make it all green and brown. Maybe you want to do like me, make it all vibrant and happy. And last but not least, we've got these murky touches, and this is where I will do some mixing. I know if I take a warm brown and a blue and I mix them in watercolors, for example, they'll become neutral. This is quite a neutral, dark area. Rather than applying black to it, I'm going to do the mixing approach. I'm going to do lines. We have these lines coming through our image. We do lines of brown lines of blue. You can already see here, look, where they crossover? Do you see how it's neutral? Hopefully, you can imagine when we add our water in the next step, those neutrals will build up and become really exciting. Last but not least, it's feeling a bit empty up here and down here. I'm actually going to leave the sky till a little bit later, but I will jump down here and here, maybe I will use just some nice grays. I don't want to overpower the image, but I want to get the feel of there being something going on here. What's next? Well, you guessed it. We're going to be coming back with a bit more water and moving all of these around. 6. Blending: We are back and we are going to apply some more water again. So you can see the pattern already. We do some pastel, we do some water, we do some pastel, we do some water. In doing so, we fill up the page. We make it more interesting. There's more depth. Now with this layer of water, I'm going to start with my lightest seaming colors, which are these bluey purples down here. I blend them together, and then I'm going to move them. So this gray can move up and we can just be very playful and abstract. We can soften everything out. And we're going to be able to add a lot more structure at the end, which is so close already. Up here, we've got some bright reds. Look what happens when we add that water. It just comes to life. Absolutely amazing. Like I said before, the same thing will happen with watercolor pentils. If you want to try these ideas with other media as well, maybe you're already doing it with these pastels, but you're looking for something else to do next. We'll try repeating these ideas with watercolor pentils and other water soluble media. Now I'm going to just soften a little bit of this. But I quite like the scratchy textures, and it's okay not to add water everywhere. We might want a lot of variation. We've got soft textures, scratchy dry textures, and then we'll move over here and get some more of that wet, neutral feel by mixing. But because we apply them in different layers, we'll get variety. We've got some blues coming through, we've got some browns, then in other places we've got real neutrals developing that murkier feel. I can use this. I can pick up some of this pigment here and I can draw with it with my brush so we can pick out other shadows that we haven't actually done with our dry area. Here, this gray, bit more water. Look at that. Just swamp the page a little bit, and then we can use that gray and get it moving around for us as well. Look at waters moving everywhere. That I think is a good sign, having a bit of fun on our page, there we go. That's all we need to do for this stage. 7. Sky: Now, in this little section, we're going to do the sky and here is where we can explore some other interesting techniques. If we take our brush, what you'll find is you can actually just paint so you can pick out from your past, your pencil some blue and just paint with it. We don't have to preload the page with our pigment. You can even splatter. Look at that. I's really fine, interesting splatter, which you can then soften together with your brush. I can pick out a couple of different blues. That's quite a light blue. Here's a deeper blue. Pop that in there, get a bit of mixing going on on the page. Like that, a bit more splatter in there. Then we'll go to a really light blue. This is our turquoise blue that we've already encountered. I can use that to be neat. You can see the brush has already still got that rich blue one, so we're going to have to get a bit more of our turquoise, there we go. Now we can neaten up these edges, get that blue floating and flowing around. Then what I'm going to do with this wet, use that blue to imply some reflections in the windows. Now I know these windows are actually quite dark except for these ones, but my windows are at least going to start with having a bright blue reflection. There we go. That's a nice start, I think. It just gives the image a bit of a lift, doesn't it? Can do some dry textures in the sky as well, little scribbles, have a play, make something abstract. There you go, yet another way to use these amazing pastels. 8. Structure: Like that, we're actually nearing the end. I know this looks quite abstract, but that's where our final magic step comes in. Again, I'm just going to get one of my pastels nice and sharp. Here's where I think it's quite helpful to get a darker color. I personally love sepia. I think sepia is a nice almost neutral. It's actually a brownie tinge. It's not black, so it's not overwhelming and we can use that to draw and to provide that structure I mentioned just a few minutes ago. Look, as we draw around it, notice I've left the page wet. I've not waited for it to dry because that gives us some variety. As we draw, we get this sudden popping out effect, all these colors suddenly fill out that page, make it into something fascinating, or at least that's my interpretation. I hope that you're enjoying yourself enough to have that interpretation of your own work as well. It's really good to have a positive outlook because it can feel chaotic, especially doing an exploratory approach like this can really feel chaotic and scary. Just take the leap, see what happens and then refine it next time. At least that's my approach. Much more fun I think than spending hours doing exercises to work things out. Hopefully you can see what I'm doing working gradually around the image, flowing around these original shapes, going all the way back to the first step, flowing and floating around to just add what I'm calling structure, a little bit of direction to those colors which we've spent ages getting to float all over the page. We can follow some of these original lines. We can also add new ones. I could add got this little rim to the window. We could add that in now, just a little suggestion. Not trying to be too neat or too specific. I'd really encourage you to let this be quite an abstract, fun, alive process. So this line goes into the sky. I find that fun. You might not, but give it a go. You won't know until you try it, whether you like it or, you know, if you hate it. But then at least you tried it and you learn. Find these details again. We've got this lovely sign here with a window behind it. Since we know we have that sign, we know as well that we've got a little bit of room to play with some other colors, haven't we? We've got this now popping out a bit more. Now that we've been a bit more specific, bit darker with our lines, and we can continue this drawing approach. I could find that this has a pinky blob with a couple of nice blues around it. And then it's got some yellow in it as well. So we'll take actually let's make it orange. It really stands out and we can make ourselves this sign. We can put some more oranges in here and under there, just have it play. See what happens. Get that feeling of that sunlight. On the top, it feels a little empty on top of this roof. I'll just do a tiny bit of light texture. In the windows, we've got all snicty little details. Let's play with those ideas. We can use some blues, just picking up almost random things. Things I've used already is what I'm aiming for, but not thinking too hard about it. I'm just getting the impression of these busy windows, block in a little bit again. There we go. That one's interesting now. Maybe we do the same over here. So small shapes, small marks to make it feel like there's a lot going on. We can even block in some of the darker tones of these windows now. All these dark details just suggest a lot of work and effort has gone in. In fact, we're just having a play. We're just having a bit of fun. But it's simple big bold marks. That's all we're all we're doing. It feels a bit funny without the blue in the window here, and I just missed out at the beginning, there we go, a bit more blue to go on. Then on top of that blue, bit more of our darks, just like we have over here. Got a big sign I missed out as well. And you can hopefully, again, just see what am I doing? I'm just having a play. I'm wondering around go, miss that out. Maybe there's an interesting way I can explore. We can add interesting details. All these cobblestones. Let's try those. Let's do a little flicks and flex with our little brown pastel here. We've got different color of cobblestone then on the left, or gray, so we'll do different flex and flicks over here. Then the background, gets a bit darker, a bit more moody, a bit deeper. So we'll do some more of that purple and bring it right to the edge of the building. Because that edge will help this building hopefully pop forward. And then I'm going to keep this as part of the same step because what we can do now, of course, is activate some all that that we've just done. We can activate, we can get these blues and reds mingling and softening. We can have a fiddle, we can get that dark in the roof. We can get this shadow coming down here a little bit more. We can have a play just moving and flicking around with our brush. Don't over do it this way. We've added the structure. We don't want to lose all of that wonderful hard earned structure. We just want a tiny bit more pizzas on top, something just to make it more vibrant and loose. If you wanted, you could keep going. I'm tempted just to do a couple of brick marks, a couple of little bits in here. And maybe I'll take some purples and do some brick marks with those as well. Then maybe what we've lost a tiny bit of is the sense of these horizontal stripes, so let's get those back little bit. Just a little bit. Easy. It's easy to overwork at this stage. So at the point where you think, Oh, what am I doing? I'm fiddling, which is very easy to do. Then take a step back, pop your initials on and admire the fun that you've just had. There you go, This is my scene complete. 9. Variety: Final final step, of course, is to admire our art, but also to consider alternatives. So I just wanted to show you that actually these astols if you're using pencils or in tents or something like that can be used not just for urban sketches, but for abstract landscapes and all sorts of other things as well. So experiment, take these ideas and play with them, see what happens, and share with me the results. You can pop your project up in the class resources and project gallery. I'd absolutely love to see a big variety and your style as well. If you've enjoyed this, leave a review. Takes a couple of minutes, and it means the world. And perhaps I'll see you in one of my other sketching classes on Skillshare. If you enjoy this, you'll probably enjoy my watercolor pencil classes or my ink tenth classes, for example.