Overall I’m pretty happy with the final results, and even though the bridge stonework is a lot lighter in color in my drawing than in the original photo I figured I’d just think of this as a daytime rendering instead of a nighttime one.
The Urban Sketching Handbook Architecture and Cityscapes: Tips and Techniques for Drawing on Location (Volume 1)
Award-winning illustrator Gabriel Campanario first introduced his approach to drawing in The Art of Urban Sketching, a showcase of more than 500 sketches and drawing tips shared by more than 100 urban sketchers around the world. Now, he drills down into specific challenges of making sketches on location, rain or shine, quickly or slowly, and the most suitable techniques for every situation, in The Urban Sketching Handbook series. It’s easy to overlook that ample variety of buildings and spaces and the differences from city to city, country to country. From houses, apartments and shopping malls to public buildings and places of worship, the structures humans have created over the centuries, for shelter, commerce, industry, transportation or recreation, are fascinating subjects to study and sketch.
In The Urban Sketching Handbook: Architecture and Cityscapes, Gabriel lays out keys to help make the experience of drawing architecture and cityscapes fun and rewarding. Using composition, depth, scale, contrast, line and creativity, sketching out buildings and structure has never been more inspirational. This guide will help you to develop your own creative approach, no matter what your skill level may be today. As much as The Urban Sketching Handbook: Architecture and Cityscapes may inspire you to draw more urban spaces, it can also help to increase your appreciation of the built environment. Drawing the places where we live, work and play, is a great way to show appreciation and creativity.
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Genres ArtArchitectureDrawingNonfictionReference
112 pages, Paperback
Published November 16, 2014
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Displaying 1 – 23 of 23 reviews
944 reviews 127 followers
A fun little book with some usefull tips. Wished that some concepts would have been explained more for a better understanding. A quick read for beginners.
6 likes
391 reviews 72 followers
This was a simple book filled with helpful tips that you can use if you want to go and draw buildings , landscapes etc. The example drawings in it are very nice. The tips are concise and helpful. All in a very compact book that would be easy to throw in a messenger bag or backpack and refer to. 4 enthusiastic stars.
4 likes
153 reviews 14 followers
Simple introduction, to composition, scale, depth, line and creativity
more details needed
1 like
133 reviews 9 followers
I found this a bit sparse, and sometimes a cash grab, as some of the tips were pretty obvious Although if you’re like me and don’t mind being reminded of art fundamentals, then I guarantee you’ll still find value in this book
I highly appreciate Gabriel Campanario’s succinct writing on the different topics tackled—because of this, reading the handbook was a breeze ✍️ The sketches featured are phenomenal as usual (Youtuber Teoh Yi Chie’s artworks are in this book!) and a good source of inspiration if you’re in sketching slump All in all this is a great companion to the handbook on understanding perspective (which is still the best urban sketching handbook of the bunch imo)
1 like
30 reviews 8 followers
The author writes that the “keys” of composition, depth, scale, contrast, line and creativity, are the gold standard for creating a good sketch. Composition is having harmony in a drawing. In order to achieve a sense of “balance and completeness”, the objects should fit in well together. A bad composition will most certainly ruin a drawing. The “rule of thirds” can help one achieve harmony. Begin by lightly sketching two equally spaced horizontal lines across your paper. Then erect two equally spaced vertical lines so that you end up with nine equally sized squares. The main subject of one’s drawing can then be placed where the lines intersect.
One can make a “viewfinder” (think rectangle) with one’s hands to isolate a subject. Not everything can be captured in a short time frame, so a viewfinder can help you isolate scenes of interest, for instance an acroterion on a classical or neo-classical building.
For a drawing to look realistic, objects must be scaled proportionally. So ask yourself “how big does this bicycle look in relation to this building?” Then use the building as a continuous reference for judging the scale of other objects in the sketch. Or, one can fully stretch out one’s arm to measure scale with one’s pencil, which I think is the more powerful method. Drawings of cars and people in the sketch can also help create a real sense of scale.
Perspective is essential for the illusion of depth in a sketch. The horizon line is found by looking straight ahead, at eye level. The heads of other people drawn in the sketch will also generally fall on this line. One can then establish vanishing points—points in a scene where parallel lines meet or “converge”. Sometimes, especially with angles which don’t run parallel to the horizon line, the vanishing point may be above or below the horizon line. Perspective also applies when looking down from a building, or looking up at one. It’s crucial to draw what you see rather than what you think you see. Moreover, using more than three tonal grades (e.g light, medium, dark) is vital for establishing a realistic sense of volume.
The values of colours (for instance the difference in the lightness and darkness of colours in sunlit and shaded areas) of both a scene and a sketch can be found by squinting. It’s essential that values in a sketch match the values in a scene. The light areas in a sketch can be also “suggested” by drawing the darkest areas. In other words, show contrast.
Line work in a sketch should be confident and economical. A misrepresentation is not a non-representation. So an economical sketch which captures the main lines is enough to make suggestions to the imagination. Indeed, sometimes less is more.
I rate this book four stars because I think the author could have done a better job of explaining the rule of thirds, especially since he deems it so essential for creating a good composition in a sketch (I had to look elsewhere for a clearer explanation). Otherwise Campanario has put together a fine book.
430 reviews 7 followers
Simple book, interesting, not very detailed, with good tips, and is a quick read. Having read four of these US Handbook books, I wonder whether I’d have done better and more inexpensively to find one book with the information I found in four of these. Oh well, sunk costs — I got these cheap, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.
104 reviews
I give it 3,5 Stars rounded down to 3.
A fine book that you can breeze through in a couple days.
Though it is by no means going in depth or with useful exercises that will make you improve quickly I find it a good supplement when doing a video course on something like perspective, composition or proportions.
I’m glad my library had this book in their catalogue.
52 reviews 1 follower
A useful handbook with lots of examples illustrating the most important aspects of urban sketching.
It’s a handbook so it is a general introduction to the art of sketching architecture and citiscapes, not an exhaustive guide.
I’ve scanned the whole book now and expect to use this many times in the future to look at my sketches critically, figure out what is missing or can be done better.
183 reviews
I’m screening art books from the library before deciding what to purchase for detailed study. This little book goes into the “possibly/maybe” list. Good review of drawing and observational techniques for urban environments. And a great list of challenges on the last page.
184 reviews 355 followers
The book delivers what the title says: good beginner tips for sketching. It’s a good inspiration for anyone who’s getting into it, not just for urban artists, as the points made apply to a wide range of illustrations. Liked it and will probably use it as a reference again in the future.
298 reviews 33 followers
Covers basic lessons about urban sketching,lots of pictures and examples. Easy to understand and quick read.
92 reviews 5 followers
Didn’t know what to expect from this, but was pleased that I chose to pick it. A clean and clear way of teaching useful tips coupled with beautiful sketches from around the world!
55 reviews 4 followers
<3 love it
34 reviews
Quick read, easy to digest for absolute beginners. It’s not really an instructional book, but more of a book of useful tips for learning urban sketching. Drawings are inspiring.
179 reviews 4 followers
Kudos to Campanario for co-founding urbansketchers.org. A simple book for beginners, didn’t like the sketches much, though.
Basic and easy-going cityscape sketching
When I was in high school one of my favorite classes was art class. I loved everything, but ceramics was my big passion, mainly because I didn’t get caught up with the vision I had in my head. Painting and drawing were always a struggle for me because I would get this clear idea in my head of what it should look like and I could never manage to match reality to my preconceived vision. But I have to say, teaching lower school has renewed my interest in drawing, because there is nothing I love more than sitting at a very small table with a group of first graders and working on one of their worksheets with them. This spring after a particularly satisfying class drawing diagrams of birds, I decided to start sketching on my own at night as a way to decompress. I began with colored pencil sketches of birds since that is what I had been doing at school. Here are two of my favorites!
But this post isn’t about birds, as you can clearly see from the subject line, it’s about a cityscape! But I wanted to share the part about the birds because it was those little sketches that really renewed my passion in drawing as an art form, and made me open to trying out this next project. A couple of weeks ago I was scrolling through Craftgawker and I spotted this amazing cityscape from The Postman’s Knock. Lindsey Bugbee is an amazing artist and calligrapher who not only does this as a profession, but shares her amazing secrets as tutorials and helpful tips on her blog! Her tutorial featured a gorgeous cityscape of Atlanta, Georgia, that she made for a wedding client of hers. And with my background in architecture I was pretty hooked the instant I saw it! I couldn’t get it out of my head and just knew I had to attempt my own, though I didn’t buy it for a second when Lindsey kept encouraging her readers about how easy it was. And I was right, this is not a quick and easy project, but I am pretty pleased with the results.
First I had to chose a photo to copy. I think I struggled with this part most of all, and finally chose two photographs that I took a few years ago in graduate school during an architectural photography class. One was from the daytime part of the class while the second one was from the night photography portion of the class. (Night photography totally captured my heart, but that’s a story for a different post…) Here are the two images I chose to work from. Why two? Because the first one I chose (with the Brooklyn Bridge) was a bit too difficult for my first attempt.)
Lindsey talks about free handing her piece, and recommends having a strong understanding of how to draw things in perspective, using a technique that she doesn’t name specifically but which I learned in school as Two Point Perspective. Basically you have two points on a horizon line, and all of your lines start from the vertical and then trace back to those two points. (She links to a YouTube video in her post, I didn’t watch it but I’m sure it explains it better than I just tried to.) It’s actually pretty simple and a really fun drawing technique, and as I said, one that I understand very well. But even with that knowledge and my masters degree in architecture, I still really really struggled trying to freehand my drawing. (Would anyone else have known in the end that I felt I had struggled? Probably not. But given my perfectionist tendencies, plus the fact that architecture is my field, and I’d taken the original photo I was copying, close just wasn’t going to cut it.) So I gave up on the freehand and decided to move on to tracing. I opened the photo on my computer in iPhoto and made it as large as possible. Why iPhoto? Because that way I could edit the photo as I went making the exposure very bright to capture detail in the darker sections, and things like that. Once I had the photo up on my screen I opened my big drawing notebook (about the size of a letter or A4 piece of paper) on top of my computer and taped the outer edge of one sheet on top of the monitor section of my laptop. In retrospect since I was going to eventually tear the sheet out of my notebook anyway I probably should have just torn the sheet out at that point, it might have been easier than using my whole notebook. Oops… The paper that I happened to have was from a sketch pad of 60 lb paper so it was relatively thin and you could pretty easily see the image from the screen through the paper. So I forged ahead with my tracing. I got pretty far with my first drawing before I gave up (for the moment, I may keep working on it in the future) and moved onto my second photo. Here’s where I got with the first one.
I then moved onto my second photo which I found much easier because it didn’t have all the finicky little lines of the Brooklyn Bridge to worry about. This view is of one of the piers of the Manhattan Bridge, in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. (For non-New Yorkers, Dumbo stands for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. This is one of the piers of that overpass.) It is definitely up there as one of probably my top three night photographs I took, so being an image I was really invested in probably helped. First you need to sketch the entire image in pencil. I wasn’t sure what to do about the cobblestone street so I vaguely sketched in a few of the stones and figured I’d come back to it later. Playing with the contrast of the photo in iPhoto was what really helped fill in the underside of the bridge which pretty much just looks black in my original photo but actually had a lot of interesting metalwork. I decided to basically draw my entire scene in pencil before starting in with the ink, though if you read Lindsey’s tutorial it looks like she started with ink when she was mostly done with her scene, but would switch back to pencil to work on small details like all the little windows. I forgot to document my drawing with just the pencil, but as you’ll see from this series of photos I did take a few process shots as I started adding in the ink lines so you could get a sense of how it came together.
I used a set of Micron pens for all the ink work. I really like how these pens draw, and I also happened to already have a set left over from school. (Plus I don’t know how to use an ink pen and nibs.) It actually brought back a lot of memories because the pens are in a box with the rest of my drafting stuff and seeing the pencil leads and lead holders really brought me back to four years ago! Learning to hand draw architectural drawings is no joke, let me tell you. For instance, did you know you have to spin the lead holder as you draw a line so that you don’t flatten one side of your lead (these leads are about 1/16″ thick, not like mechanical pencil leads). If you spin as you draw then you are always wearing out the point evenly and you never end up with a line that goes from thin to thick. Crazy, right?! But I digress…
As I said, I used a set of Micron pens for the drawing part. I really loved the thin points, the 01 and 005 pens, for getting all the thin little details. I didn’t get along as well with the thicker pointed 05 and 08 pens, because I just felt they didn’t get a thick enough line. In the future I might choose to do the thicker black lines afterwards with a different pen. Here is my drawing when it was finished. You’ll notice I left the street in pencil because I still wasn’t sure how I was going to shade it in. I also wasn’t sure what I was going to do about the buildings in the distance so I left those in pencil too.
Now it was time to shade it in! I followed Lindsey’s instructions and used india ink for most of it. I also purchased a set of the Manga pens she mentioned from Faber-Castell. They have a set of 8 gray and black pens that I found on Amazon.com which were perfect. When they arrived I discovered that instead of nicely going from black to gray they actually had two sets of gray, a warm and cold gray. Personally I would have chosen the cold gray (which has more blue in it) because I greatly prefer that color of gray, but I realized the warm gray (more brown) matched the india ink better so I used the Warm Gray IV 273 and Black only. This is where I might have chosen to do the thick lines using the Manga Black instead of the Micron, the soft felt tip might have made a nicer/easier thick line than the stiff Micron. Who knows. I ended up only using the pens on the metal bridge portion (top left corner) and on the black city buildings in the distance, because I realized that if I tried to shade in large sections of space I would get a very streaky color which I absolutely HATE, plus it would be hard to get the nice shading that I could get with the india ink. So after a bit of careful marker work I really only used ink for the rest of it. You can see in these process shots how the ink got layered on. I mixed a few different strengths of ink and did a lot of painting multiple layers to get darker colors. (One of the downsides of picking a night photo as my inspiration, it was very dark and mysterious looking, something that is harder to capture in a drawing!) You’ll also see a blue border, that is the painters tape I used to tape my paper down onto a sturdy board for painting. I was worried that my thin paper would curl and warp a lot with the wet ink and it did, but miraculously it flattened back out as soon as it dried. It’s curling slightly now that I took it off the board but I might just leave it overnight under a book to really flatten it out again.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the final results, and even though the bridge stonework is a lot lighter in color in my drawing than in the original photo I figured I’d just think of this as a daytime rendering instead of a nighttime one.
One of my favorite parts is the bit of actual bridge that you can see in the corner, the part I colored in with the Manga markers, so it makes me think that for my next drawing I should focus on smaller details, maybe choosing a cityscape with lots of smaller buildings like Lindsey’s instead of one large focus object. We’ll see. (I was on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other night and thought that the view of midtown Manhattan from there would be a great focus of a long panorama drawing. Maybe that will be my next attempt…) You’ll also notice I abandoned the cobblestones on the street. I tried drawing them in after a dark wash of ink, so it was a subtle pattern, but it just wasn’t looking right so I went back over it with a darker wash and now its basically just solid black.
I also remembered to grab a photo of the supplies I used, the india ink was whatever brand my little stationary store had, but everything else was what Lindsey recommended. I also only had one small brush that’s a little angled wedge, but it worked pretty well and the edge was perfect for thin lines. I did pull out a bigger brush for the big sections of the street, very important if you don’t want streaky areas. I augmented the streakiness for the stones, to capture the natural variety, but for the street I wanted a more uniform look.
I hope you have enjoyed this less orthodox post, and if you haven’t done so already I definitely recommend you check out Lindsey’s blog, it is really fabulous! I can’t wait to try her Faux-Calligraphy tutorial!
P.S. Come back later this week for a fun and very colorful update to a past project.
