Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for just starting out! I struggled a lot with perfectionism in the first few years I sketched. This house is accurate, but… I could tell it wasn’t loose, free, or fast. I had also never used watercolor before, didn’t have the right pens, and worried way too much about making things perfect. I’m fairly comfortable with basic drawing concepts, but I would overwork what I was trying to draw. This was one of the first sketches I tried to make. If you look at drawings I made 10 years ago, you can see that my style was there, but it needed a lot more work to develop. You get to the point where you are confident enough to move your pen without getting bogged down by everything you are seeing. Your individual style will develop as you practice a lot and get comfortable with the basic concepts of sketching from life. The biggest thing you need to remember when you start sketching is that you should never force yourself to use a certain style. Beginners can feel frustrated that their drawings don’t look as confident as others who have been practicing for a while. Urban Sketching can look very loose and stylized. It shows that you can make some fun drawings by relaxing, having fun, and not worrying about the person being anatomically correct. This section shows how people can be included in a sketch in a variety of styles. Including people can be one of the most intimidating parts of sketching in public. It’s pretty fun and feels like a children’s novel, but you can still tell it’s a city park. They also used some solid blocks of color instead of including every blade of grass. The artist chose to use a few strokes of blue watercolor instead of trying to capture every ripple in the river. This is a great example of simplifying what’s in front of you. Instead of trying to add every detail that you see, you can have a lot of fun by focusing on a few objects instead. If you live in the Medicine Hat area, you’ll also have a lot of chances to draw the prairie scenery that surrounds our community. Here’s some cool ways that other artists have chosen to portray them. They can be very simple, or very complex. If you’re getting into urban sketching, you know that you’ll wind up drawing a building sooner or later. You can also make some really neat looking trees with a few pen scribbles and dabs of watercolor. This artist did a really great job of including just enough branches to suggest how big this tree is. You normally won’t want to try and get every single branch in your composition because it’ll make it look too busy. Tree branches can also be very complex to draw or paint. Paying attention to what makes each tree different will be really helpful on your art journey. You won’t want to draw a pine tree the same way you would draw a cedar tree. I really love how using a few “blobs” of watercolor can add such detail to a cityscape! Leaving the rest of the drawing unshaded is also a great way to add emphasis to the trees.Įach kind of tree is unique. I hope you find these examples as helpful as I do! I still struggle with drawing trees - bare and with leaves. They look so simple right away, but it can be tempting to try and draw every leaf, every color, and end up with an overworked sketch. When you’re just starting out, trees can be difficult to figure out. It’s really true - no two urban sketches are alike. Some are simple, some use pops of color, while others look more complicated. The following sketches are all very lovely in their own ways. These are two very different styles, but I love how the bridge yellows, reds, and blues were used to draw attention to each of the stores. This is a really great example of using sketching to figure out architectural details. I love how loose this sketch is and the fun use of color. I’ve included some art that I really like, and I hope you like it too. There’s countless ways and styles to sketch. Now that you know the basics of sketching things… what’s next? You’ll find your own way to draw the world around you. Co-op Community Developmental Play Space.