Lately, I’ve been reluctant to sign up to new courses to learn pretty much anything. My life is quite full, although I always make time for creativity.
But I’m trying to spend more time practicing creativity, not just learning more new things that I don’t have time to practice.
However, I’m still hooked on sketching!
There’s something about the portability and spontaneity of sketching that really appeals to me. I love the idea that I can create something in just a few minutes, in moments throughout the day when I might have been just looking at my phone. I’m hungry for knowledge about sketching tips and techniques, and I’m still at the stage of learning where my taste exceeds my abilities.
Sketching Now
When it comes to urban sketching courses, Liz Steel has some of the best at Sketching Now. I first signed up to the online Travel Sketching course a couple of years ago, but I didn’t have much time to spend doing the assignments and practicing. The in-person workshop on Cockatoo Island was a great opportunity to spend stretches of focussed time doing nothing but sketching.
Something I love about Liz’s courses: as well as theory lessons and demonstrations, there are also a lot of exercises to keep doing over and over, always learning something new.
In this way, Liz’s courses force me to spend time practicing, as well as learning. Indeed, practice is the way a lot of learning happens!
I spoke with Liz about her courses to determine the right one to take next, and decided to sign up for Edges when there was a live version about to happen. That way, I could go through the course at a steady pace with others to keep each other on track.
I chose the Edges course because I was struggling with finding depth and focus in my sketches. I often put down too much ink, and my watercolour could look overdone. This course was designed to address just those issues.
What I learned
Change of plane vs change of colour
It was helpful to differentiate edges that occur as a change of plane, and those that are a change of colour. This is helpful for thinking about when determining which edges will be drawn in ink, and which require a softer approach.
We practiced drawing an indoor scene (shoes) and an outdoor scene (a monument) with contour line for changes of plane. Then, drawing the same scene with focus on the shapes and changes of colour. This really helped me to think about which edges were the most important to capture.
Creating focus with line
Detail in line work can provide focus. Pick the focus element for the sketch, and render it in detail. Then, use fewer lines for the other elements. We practiced using different tools and different speeds to capture the same scene three times.
Break a scene into planes
To create depth in a sketch, it helps to break it down into two or three planes, then treat each plane differently. For instance, the background could be just watercolour, the middle ground ink and watercolour, and the foreground watercolour pencil.
The importance of value
Higher contrast makes for a more interesting sketch, so it’s important to make the lightest colours white and the darker colours very dark. With my photography background, it helps me to think about mentally making a contrast adjustment in Photoshop. I started to mentally increase contrast of a scene to determine the darkest and lightest areas of a sketch. It’s challenging to retain the whites in watercolour, because you have to think about it from the very beginning of the sketch. Lots to practice!
In one exercise, we did variations on an object in just local colour, then finding the darks in greyscale, then combining the two to just use colour in the darks.
Liz‘s courses are incredibly dense with information, so I expect to go through the course several more times in the future. But for now, the theory and practice of Edges has helped me make my sketches more successful.
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