Book suggestions to learn how to make urban sketches?

Jvet

I recently started to use the bullet journal method and I'm on the way of ordering a beautiful hobonichi HON to track my week and add my appointments to the included calendar. However, there's also always a blank page next to the daily page which also has space for notes or drawings.

I'd like to learn how to sketch with my fountain or ball pen as an attempt to stay away longer from lcd screens and have a time for reflection or just appreciation of life in general.

Thanks!

ctietze

Can relate!

I can't recommend a book

• Teoh from parkablogs.com has a really loose and (in my opinion) cool style to learn from. His videos are helpful in that regard to see what he achieves with diluted ink in a waterbrush and a pen.
• Colors: if you get into colors, Teoh uses quick mixtures of primary colors a lot. To assemble my palette, I collected info from him and non-urban-sketching watercolor painters about their palettes and eventually settled on "warm" and "cold" variants of red, blue, yellow and green, 2 browns, ochre and Paynes Gray.
• To unlock doodling with a pen, check out Peter Draws and try what he does (or did a couple of years ago in his daily journals) yourself: https://www.youtube.com/user/Palivizumab -- here's a tutorial on the matter:

For once, I would actually suggest scouring Instagram to find artists whose style speaks to you, and then doodle ahead.

I personally recommend waterproof ink. DeAtramentis is quite 'thin' so fountain pens don't clog up. And it dries quickly. SketchInk takes longer to dry, is more viscuous. Noodler's Ink even more so. I like DeAtramentis because it dries quickly so I don't have to be conscious of and wary about smearing.

Jvet

Thanks for sharing your advice and resources! By the way any particular notebook you recommend? I’m a fan of leuchtturm for my notebooks and bujo.

ctietze

@Jvet I use Leuchtturm softcover notebooks as my EDC with a pencil stuffed between the pages and held inside via the rubber band. The paper survives pen and ink, but it's too thin IMHO. You can see through. (So for sketches, I'd look for something more substantial. Royal Talens or Sakura are surprisingly durable and can deal with watercolor even, I use them all the time and they're very inexpensive, but I believe there's no variant with dots or any other guides.)

ZettelDistraction

@Jvet said:
I'd like to learn how to sketch with my fountain or ball pen as an attempt to stay away longer from lcd screens and have a time for reflection or just appreciation of life in general.

I have two book suggestions, though only the second--if you can find it--treats urban sketching in some detail.

1. Sketching: The Basics, by Koos Eissen and Steur Roselien.
2. The Artist's Guide to SKETCHING, by James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade.

As for Instagram artists, I recommend @willwestonstudio for a general approach to drawing that emphasizes composition, beginning with basic shapes (2-dimensional: triangles, rectangles, and circles) and forms (3-dimensional: cones, cylinders, pyramids, spheres, parallelopipeds, triangular prisms, and ribbons). There are several approaches to drawing, sight sizing being one, Will Weston's adaptable linear approach based on construction and composition being the one I found most congenial, though it meant unlearning many bad habits. I had to change my approach--before Will Weston's courses, I thought an underdrawing had more detail to begin with than basic shapes, forms, and overlapping planes, and I had no process to decide when a drawing was finished. I put together a checklist based on the online courses I took. Disclaimer: I was far from Weston's best student, and I haven't been drawing as much since my stepfather died in 2021.

Any tutorial by James Gurney is worth viewing--not to mention his art, but I find myself in awe of his mastery.

The question of what "construction" really meant took me a while to understand and put into practice. For me, a constructive approach to drawing now means starting a drawing with basic shapes and forms--anything more than that at the very beginning of a drawing is already too much (unless you're very experienced, but I resist the impulse to do more than lightly drawn constructions at the start). One doesn't start with shading, rendering, and details at that stage.

To get the hang of a constructive approach to drawing, one draws "studies," meaning drawings that stop at more or less at the construction stage (the first third of the process), perhaps filling in some of the linear drawing itself (the second third of the process), but stopping short of
rendering and creating an eye path (one eye path in commercial art, and possibly several eye paths in fine art).

I have one recommendation for constructive anatomy if you are interested in this (not the Bridgeman book of that title, though these are very good).

Jvet

@ZettelDistraction thanks for the comprehensive share of resources. I’ll try to dig into them this weekend.

Jvet

@ctietze said:
@Jvet I use Leuchtturm softcover notebooks as my EDC with a pencil stuffed between the pages and held inside via the rubber band. The paper survives pen and ink, but it's too thin IMHO. You can see through. (So for sketches, I'd look for something more substantial. Royal Talens or Sakura are surprisingly durable and can deal with watercolor even, I use them all the time and they're very inexpensive, but I believe there's no variant with dots or any other guides.)

Thanks! I’ll search for some notebooks with a higher weight of page then. In the meantime I’ll use my leuchtturm to keep learning.