For today’s second instalment in the travel journalling series, I’ll be continuing to
work on a spread for my recent New York trip, covering a topic that was suggested in the
comments of my last video which is urban-sketching, which I do think is one of the main skills
to be able to incorporate into a travel journal, with the added help of some lessons learned
on skillshare who were kind enough to sponsor this video.
Urban-sketching for me is the practice of quickly capturing the scene in front of you,
often in ink and or watercolour and it’s generally practiced on location or in plein
air but the same effect can be achieved from photos if needs be.
Urban-sketching is such an invaluable skill to have for a travel journal because it allows
you to sketch on location and capture the moment, render buildings and landscapes and
snapshots of your trip from your own unique perspective.
It’s something that I’ve really had to work on, I generally have quite a careful
and detailed approach to drawing buildings and landscapes and anything really, so in
order to nail down the main concepts that produce a successful urban-sketch; drawing
what you see, drawing quickly without letting your brain take over, and just general ink
and watercolour sketching techniques,
I ended up having a look through Skillshare who, as you know, have been a huge help for
me in the past in gaining skills and a more confident and informed approach to my work.
Since I signed up to the site at the beginning of this year, I’ve taken classes on lettering,
comics and visual story-telling and even creative writing.
If you don’t already know they’re an online learning community with classes on all sorts
of things, art, design, lifestyle, I’m planning on looking into some of their photography
and videography classes.
Anyone can sign up from anywhere, they even have an app where you can access your classes
offline which I think is an extra relevant feature for this video, as travelling artists.
Once you’re signed up to their $10 a month premium membership, you have unlimited access
to all the classes, there are something like 15,000 on there now with more being added
all the time.
And you can actually get 2 months of premium access, completely free with the code MINNIE2,
I will have a link below.
You can’t tell me it isn’t worth checking out.
It’s really become my go-to resource for learning developing new skills.
And this case was no different.
So on top of taking classes on fast inking, combating metal blocks and expressive watercolour
techniques, all of which I’ll have linked below for you, I found this incredibly in-depth
course taught by Peggy Dean, who you may actually already know from her website The Pigeon Letters,
she’s someone I consider to be a pretty big name in illustration and lettering, someone
who’s work I admire and someone with an invaluable wealth of knowledge and among a
few other classes on Skillshare she actually has one on urban-sketching.
And she spends a good two hours talking through techniques and demonstrating in real-time
with a lovely thorough commentary on everything she does, in terms of choices she makes and
even making the odd mistake and showing how she deals with that.
So today I’m going to be using what I’ve learned to create a quick sketche to be part
of my New York travel journal.
And I’ll talk you through what I’m doing and why.
Now obviously since I’m no longer in New York, I’m gonna be drawing from a photo,
which isn’t ideal but also isn't uncommon for an urban-sketch.
I will try and make a video later on in this series specifically about sketching on location.
This is just a picture I took while I was on the bus.
I like the framing of it and I always love the look of telephone wires breaking up a
scene.
In terms of tools, I’m keeping it simple and realistic to what I would typically use,
just my fine-liner and Portable Painter palette, you can check out my last Travel Journal video
for info on all the tools I take with me on a trip.
But these are the two things I used while drawing the Washington monument on location.
And before I jump right in, I have spent a little bit of time prior to this, practicing
a few of the typical things that pop up in these sketches.
In her class, Peggy actually demonstrates a few different ways to simplify and draw
things like people, windows, trees, and once you have that in your repertoire it makes
it so much easier to get them down quickly almost from muscle memory.
So try to spend a bit of time before diving right into an urban sketch, just practicing
some of the smaller elements that come up a lot.
Another thing to think about before you get started is how you’re going to frame your
drawing.
Think about the space it’s going to take up on the page, think about what parts of
it would want to include, whether you want a panoramic type of view, so going along the
page, long and slim, or maybe you want to highlight the height of a building by making
your drawing tall and narrow and not including all the stuff on the side.
And the final thing to think about, even before beginning your drawing, is what the focus
points of your drawing will be.
You can’t give everything detail and attention in this kind of situation, and you don’t
really want to anyway, that would overwhelm the piece.
Whether it’s a photo or you’re there in person, look at which areas draw your attention
and put the most detail into those while you’re drawing.
Everything else can stay relatively simple.
In a fast drawing setting, where you might have a lot of people walking by or have to
deal with the changing light of the day, something where you don’t want to spend a lot of time
in one spot with your head down and pen on the paper the best thing you can do for yourself
is spend a little bit of extra time, thinking and planning your approach so you can spend
less time actually executing it.
And now you’re thinking just get on with it!
I know someone in the comments is gonna be like ‘the drawing starts at 5 minutes 15
seconds’ but I wouldn’t say these things if they weren’t important.
So moving on to actually putting it together.
One of the most important things that I learned was to start at eye level.
So I’m actually gonna start with quite obvious feature over here.
Now you can start wherever you want in your drawing, but with your starting point at eye
level, it makes it a lot easier to work out your perspective and angle lines coming away
from the point.
Another great place to start would be a scenes vanishing point but this particular picture
doesn’t have a clear one, but both of these things are covered more thoroughly in Peggy’s
class.
Another great tip to do with eye level, something I had no idea about before, is that regardless
of how close or how far someone is, if they're average height, their head, or eyes are generally
on the same line.
It’s a great way to show perspective.
So for example, even though there’s only one person in this picture I can just add
one say over here, further back and you see his head is on the same level as this guy,
but his body is obviously smaller because he’s further away.
IT really gives depth to your drawings and is an easy way to make things make more sense.
You can also see that I'm omitting a lot of the little details that are over here, all
these cars and windows and things.
I might add a few bits in a bit later but at the moment I'm just kind of picking and
choosing which bits I include and which bits I don't.
And that’s the best part about urban sketching.
You can make your drawing whatever you want it to be.
Add things, take them away, move things around.
As long as you’re not drawing a famous landmark, like the statue of liberty, you have free
reign to alter buildings and things to work with you and your perspective.
So now that I have these few elements in here I can start looking at things based on their
scale and location.
An easy cheat for urban sketching is using different parts of your drawing as measuring
tools for the rest.
So for example, this building in the background here is about two thirds bigger than this
one in the foreground.
Now you can see I’m just kind of using that measuring method to block in basic shapes.
Learn to see a landscape as a collection of geometric, flat shapes and pay attention to
how each shape relates to the next in terms of size and angles.
It’s all about this line leads to this line at this angle for this long.
Not so much, this building is this tall and it has this many windows.
Train yourself to see shapes and lines, not things.
Now when it comes to colouring your piece, it’s really up to you how you approach things.
Peggy gives some great watercoloring tips.
For me I like quite a bit of white space in my urban sketches and I think that lends itself
well to a limited palette and a limited amount of time.
I focus on shaded areas and don’t try to be too close to the actual colours, mainly
focusing on tone.
All in all this sketch took about 30-45 minutes and would probably have been quicker if I
wasn’t talking and sketching at the same time.
I’m confident I could work just as fast in a plein air setting.
And as I said, we’ll talk about that more in future videos in the series as well as
choosing what to record in your journal and some ideas for page layouts and drawings.
In the meantime I hope you enjoyed today’s video, I hope you do check out Skillshare,
I will have the website and info on the free trial linked below.
Thanks so much for watching, I’ll see you in the next one.
Bye!