Sketcher Fest Edmonds Handout TL11

 Sketcher Fest Edmonds 2024 TL11

TALK & LEARN

Layout Tips for Urban Sketchers

Michele Cooper

Bring your overworked, disorganized or lackluster sketches for helpful suggestions that will transform your drawings into dynamic stories about your surroundings.

In this 2 hour session you’ll have an opportunity to try a simple yet effective way to untangle the confusing elements of urban sketching.

This modular layout covers about 2 hours spent with USkSeattle in the Melrose neighborhood, Seattle

You’ve arrived in a big space or a big city. Rather than being overwhelmed by everything all at once, take a few moments to register the unique features offered by the scene.

Sketch a series of vignettes as you explore architectural details, store fronts, vehicles, signage, pedestrians and other sketchers nearby.

Practice 1:

Enrich your urban sketches with a series of vignettes. Leave space for titles, add text to enhance the story. Here’s an easy way to get started:

1. Using your credit card or loyalty card, mark an elongated rectangle along the right or left margin of your blank sketch page in pencil. Leave some space above and below this frame.
2. Now use the edges of your card to make a square shape at the lower left or right edge of the first frame.
3. Survey your environment until you find something interesting that fits in each space. Use your waterproof fine liner or fountain pen for your sketches, then watercolors when the ink is dry. It’s okay to draw past the frame edges if that works best.
4. You may fill in the blank spaces with more sketches, add another frame for a third sketch, or make a title at the top or bottom of the page, add the date, temperature, weather, historical or geographical notes, etc.
5. You can decide at the end if you want to erase the frames, paint a color wash around them or use them to help organize your writing.

Write down your observations and experiences as you create a visual journal. Describe the sounds, scents, climate and conversations of your surroundings. Combined with your sketches it all becomes a dynamic record of time and place.

Minimal materials:

Pencil/eraser

Waterproof pen-like Micron .03

Pentel Aquash water brush/folded paper towel

Watercolors or watercolor pencils

Sketchbook 

Practice 2:

Improve your layout skills. Take out 2 or 3 of your old problem sketches and redo them by starting a new spread for each one using any of these layouts:

Top left: Combination vertical/modular/linear      Top right: radial      Center right: path

Bottom right: linear          Popcorn layout is random sketches like my 100 people in one week (below)

We've been contemplating the value of reflecting on and assessing our own artwork. This process not only enhances our skills but also propels us forward, with confidence and inspiration. It's crucial to recognise our successes, pinpoint areas for improvement, and, most importantly, reflect on the aspects of our work that bring us joy!

Rather than print this out, using up ink and adding reams of paper to a landfill,  I have published this handout here on my blog. I trust the participants in my Talk & Learn session will find it helpful in remembering the points brought out during our time together at Sketcherfest Edmonds. For those who missed out on Sketcher Fest this year, but somehow have discovered this page, please let me know if you also find this helpful in your practice of urban sketching.

Please keep in touch. Subscribe to my blog or check out my social media links at https://linktr.ee/michelecooperart (Instagram, Facebook, etc.)

The fishing wharf with the Olympic mountains in the background, Edmonds, WA 2024