Urban Sketching Handbook: Architecture and Cityscapes

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Choose an interesting format.

A square is hardly ever an interesting shape. Have

you ever seen a square flag? Or a square TV

screen? It’s easy to forget that the human eye sees

in a wide-angle format. Crop any scene into a long

rectangle and you’ll be one step closer to making

a unique picture.

à MURRAY DEWHURST

Victorian veranda, Auckland

22.8” x 8” | 58 x 20.3 cm;

Sennelier half-pan watercolors,

Staedtler pigment liner 0.5 on

A4 Hahnemühle landscape

sketchbook spread; about 2 hours.

Á Turn a landscape-format

sketchbook upright and you’ll

have vertical panorama.

STEPHANIE BOWER

Sagrada Família, Barcelona

5” x 16” | 12.7 x 40.6 cm;

Mechanical pencil and watercolor

on Pentalic 5” x 8” | 12.7 x 20.3 cm;

watercolor sketchbook; about 1 hour.

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Choose an interesting format.

A square is hardly ever an interesting shape. Have

you ever seen a square flag? Or a square TV

screen? It’s easy to forget that the human eye sees

in a wide-angle format. Crop any scene into a long

rectangle and you’ll be one step closer to making

a unique picture.

à MURRAY DEWHURST

Victorian veranda, Auckland

22.8” x 8” | 58 x 20.3 cm;

Sennelier half-pan watercolors,

Staedtler pigment liner 0.5 on

A4 Hahnemühle landscape

sketchbook spread; about 2 hours.

Á Outline the shape of the

sky and you will have drawn

the city skyline without even

looking at the buildings.

Start with the big shapes

Billboards, store marquees, and traffic signs are great fun

to draw, but they can be distracting at the early stages of

making a drawing. To understand the scene, I first look at

shape relationships of large areas such as the sky, the mass

of buildings, and the ground.

Sky

Street

Buildings

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18

|

Architecture and Cityscapes

Make it fit ...

Sometimes, an archway

or a window will frame

the scene for us. Most

of the time, though,

you have to build an

imaginary frame around

the area you intend to

sketch. It’s important to

know how much you

want to fit on the page;

otherwise, you could run

out of space.

Toolbox

A framing device makes

finding good compositions

easier. They call them

viewfinders for a reason.

A 35-mm slide frame

L-shaped cardboard frames

Your hands (and you’re not

likely to forget those!)

Ä ROGER O’REILLY

Trinity College Dublin

5.5” x 8” | 14 x 20 cm; Diluted

black liquid-acrylic ink on Canson

A5 heavy cartridge sketchpad;

20 minutes.

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Key1: Composition

|

19

à Once you know what

area you want to draw, trace

the shape of the area on the

page and create a thumbnail

sketch of the composition.

Now, will everything fit?

First Baptist Church, Seattle

7.2” x 11.8” | 18 x 30 cm;

Noodler’s ink and watercolor

on Canson watercolor paper;

1.5 hours.

Ä ROGER O’REILLY

Trinity College Dublin

5.5” x 8” | 14 x 20 cm; Diluted

black liquid-acrylic ink on Canson

A5 heavy cartridge sketchpad;

20 minutes.

... Or crop it.

Don’t try to make the building

fit when it doesn’t. It’s better

to crop, as you would if you

were taking a photograph.

Á RICHARD ALOMAR

Guggenheim Museum

11” x 5” | 28 x 12.7 cm; Lamy

Safari with Noodler’s Lexington

Gray ink on Moleskine watercolor

notebook; 30 minutes.

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