The Urban Sketcher

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I’m excited to announce my instructional book from North Light Books: “The Urban Sketcher: Techniques for Seeing and Drawing on Location”.

The book contains a self-directed urban sketching workshop that will take you step-by-step from sketching simple objects to reporting from the streets and alleys of foreign cities.

The learning process laid out in this book represents years of my own experimentation, distilled to the very essence of sketching. Each demonstration and the accompanying exercises builds on the one before. Everything you practice will make the next step easier.

We’ll start with basic pencil-drawing, then progress through pen & ink, and finally, touch on painting in watercolor. You’ll practice first with isolated objects, then move on to street scenes.

Before you know it, you’ll be drawing architecture in the city and eventually, people and events as they happen in real time.

Artistic skills, like any rewarding activity, take time and practice to develop. You might not notice a change one day to the next; only after weeks or months can you look back and see your progress. The important thing is to enjoy the process, and keep at it.

My goal is for you to take your time, work through the book, using places and things found in your daily life, and gradually be introduced to all the essential skills of urban sketching.

The best thing is, you’ll be out in the world sketching from the very first day. You’ll experience your city in a new light, you’ll get better drawings by working on location, and you’ll bring back interesting stories to go with your sketchbooks.

If you’ve always wanted to join the world wide community of Urban Sketchers, or if you’re already a sketcher and you’re looking to re-invest in your drawing , I wrote this book just for you. It would mean a lot to me, to see the book reach sketchers all over the world.

And of course, I am adding new stories and drawings about my sketching activities to this blog every week. I hope you’ll dive back in to the archives. There are drawings going back going back to my first sketchcrawls in 2007.

So please, subscribe to the blog (click ‘sign me up’ in the upper right corner), or find me on Facebook and let’s keep in touch.