Explore your surroundings with urban sketching, using line and wash or pen and watercolour techniques, enhanced by characterful and deceptively simple line work.

In this course, I will teach you how to capture the scenes around you in your sketches, drawings and urban sketches using fine liners, fountain pens and, if you want, a touch of watercolors. We will focus on the fundamentals of urban sketching, an effective and interesting ink sketch developing both our line work and our expression of shape and volume, for example, through hatching.

Your everyday life is full of interesting scenes, and fantastic places to sketch. I would go so far as to that everything is sketchable: from breakfast, to your morning walk, through to the commute home.

Capturing scenes that are so different can feel scary, but with the fundamentals of urban sketching, and having great techniques for drawing those first lines, you’ll soon be sketching away confidently.

My style of sketching uses loose and fun lines, focussing on building up the essence of the scene, and using my line work to go beyond silhouettes and outlines, instead quickly and simply getting volume and shape. This, I believe, is what makes sketches really great.

What will you learn in this urban sketching course?

Firstly, we’ll focus on what to pack the sort of minimalist sketching setup that we need as urban sketches. I'll show you my sketching equipment which can literally fit into my pocket still is everything I need for day sketching and having fun.

We are of course focusing on pen so I spend a couple of lessons showing you my fans talking through the differences and why I like someone why I like some a little less or have specific uses for certain pens. Fountain pens are often my favourite and the reason is you can use allsorts of different inks. I'll show you my inks and will describe and look at how we can use different inks to create different effects from waterproof inks through to soluble links that can create fascinating washes and textures.

I can even show you a couple of interesting ways to use your fountain pen, for example taking the ink from the nib just like you would use a watercolour pan to create loose tone and colour quickly and easily in your sketching.

One of the fundamentals of sketching is understanding what quality of line means. In a couple of practical hands on lessons I'll show you this, talk you through what quality of line means in urban sketching and drawing and give you my 3 best tips to immediately enhance your line work in your sketching.

Next will look at how to create tone shadow and volume. You may well have heard of seeing or even be a pro at hatching and crosshatching. I'll talk you through some basic techniques from vertical hatching through to a five or even six-point value scale that you can use to create and reference different tones in your sketching.

There is more to hatching than just straight lines and I'll give you the whole class on advanced techniques for hatching using textures to build up value, or using more naturalistic hatching styles that blend well into your image.

Using all these techniques might seem daunting but I promise you it's not it's actually surprisingly simple but incredibly effective on the page. To show this I'm going to give you 3 demonstrations of three quite different techniques and styles of sketching each of them focusing on the line work but adding different elements of colour water washes or water colours to bring different textures and fun and life.

Who is this urban sketching course for?

This class is for anyone who loves urban sketching using pen and ink, line and wash or water colours to capture their urban scenes.

As a beginner the lessons are in depth fully narrated and explained I will give you some great ideas for getting started from more intermediate or advance sketches there are novel techniques and interesting ways of thinking about urban sketching which might help you incorporate some of these tips and tricks into your own style.

Requirements and materials

You certainly don't need to be a pro to start this class, whilst some sketching experience would be beneficial in immediately taking on board some of the later lessons, just having some curiosity and a sense of fun is all you need to get started.

The basic materials you need are simply some sketching paper and a pen. This might be a fine liner a fountain pen or other sketching pen but you could also try these techniques with simple markers ballpoint pens or anything else.

For some of the techniques a brush, for example the size 68 or 10 round brush will help you. And you might want to add a splash of colour with water colour paints watercolour pencils or sketching markers.

Credits:

"Apero Hour" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Stacie Reed

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