The Spring Session of my Urban Sketching Class at Crealde School of Art (600 St Andrews Blvd Winter Park, FL) will start March 29, 2020 and run for 6 classes. The classes are on Sunday mornings starting at 9:30am to 12:30pm. Each class begins in the main campus classroom where I introduce a premise. Much of the focus is on learning to create compositions that use the whole page. The supplies are cheap and easy to find, a sketchbook, pencil and eraser, pen and ink, and watercolor. The main hope is to share my love of sketching on location every day and to carry a sketch journal wherever you go.
In this class I had introduced some basic human anatomy (note the blackboard sketches) and the students are tasked with sketching one another being sure to get more that one fellow student in the sketch. For each student I go around and dash off a quick composition sketch. I know that an important aspect of this assignment was making students in the foreground large and far students small. My notes are usually dashed off on my iPad so I don’t waste paper. But if the student wants I do it in their sketchbook as well. In this note, I wrote BIG to stress the importance of making the foreground figure big and then focusing on the smaller figures behind. I am also showing the way to use tile floor and paneled ceilings to stress one point perspective to draw the viewers eye into the scene. We learn by doing. The goal is to produce a lot of sketches consistently. A sketch by definition is never complete so there is less pressure and the next sketch will be better having learned from what didn’t work at the moment. As Chuck Jones said, “All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.”
Urban Sketching: Tips and Techniques