Traveler's Urban Sketchbook: Beginners Guide to Sketching

Take your first step in learning how to sketch with a Contour Line Drawing! This technique is all about turning off your "thinking brain" and turning on your "observing brain." Sounds simple, right? It's not — and that's okay! You'll likely find yourself struggling a bit with this first drawing, not because it's hard, but because you're rewiring the way your brain works. Instead of thinking about what something is, you'll be learning to truly see it: the lines, the shapes, the values, the textures right in front of you.

So for this exercise, you'll be drawing a crumpled piece of paper! There's a method to this seemingly silly choice — a crumpled piece of paper gives your brain nothing to "think" about. You're forced to simply look: at the edges, the interior lines, the shadows and shades that naturally appear. It's also a lot more fun than it sounds!

Here's the fun challenge: try to complete your first contour line drawing by...

• Not lifting your pen off the page (as much as possible)

• Not looking down at your paper while you draw (as much as possible)

Feel free to do as many of these drawings as you'd like — I'd suggest at least 3, so you can really settle into the joy of looking at something rather than thinking about it. Honestly, it's one of my favorite ways to draw, and I think you're going to love it too!

Take step two in your Contour Line Drawing journey! In this lesson, you'll add recognizable, multiple objects into your composition. Watch as I use that same method — seeing the edges, interior lines, and shades and shadows — but this time across three objects that come together to form one composition.

For this exercise, look no further than your own breakfast table. Grab your sketchbook, and give it a try! For your second version of this drawing, try adding a strawberry or another piece of food to your plate. I'd suggest doing this drawing at least twice, so you can really get a feel for how objects are placed and sized in relation to one another.

And once again, try your best to stick to our two golden rules:

• Don't lift your pen off the paper (as much as you can)

• Don't look down at what you're drawing (as much as you can)

Enjoy, and I'll see you in our next lecture!

After I finished my breakfast, I was looking around my house and my eye stopped at this little bronze rabbit sculpture.  When I put it on my brick floor, the shadow was just lovely and its shape made me think about the Pueblo Architecture that I plan for us to sketch at the end of this class,

So this next sketch is a warm up for the final sketch of a Pueblo revival style building in Santa Fe.  It has the same curves and proportions that you will find on many natural objects.  This sculpture sits on a brick floor which will give you practice creating the illusion of a flat surface by drawing geometric lines that replicate the floor from your eye's point of view. 

For Assignment Four of your Contour Drawing journey, we will go to a place most of us a very familiar with, a coffee shop.  After having my burrito this morning, I explored the old town plaza of Santa Fe and while I was stopping for some coffee, I saw this adorable potted plant.  It looked like it needed a little love, so I thought I'd sketch it. 

This is what Urban/Travelers sketching is all about.  Taking notice of something that catches your eye and doing a quick sketch.  Some sketchers even like to jot down little notes about what they noticed while drawing, as a way to remember the moment later. It's such a personal way to mark a moment in time, even if that moment happens right in your favorite coffee shop!

This will be the final contour drawing of the course, but certainly not the last time you will use the contour method.   As you wander around the city of Santa Fe, the contour method comes in handy for drawing the Pueblo Revival style architecture that is iconic to the city.  We will be drawing the tower from the New Mexico Museum of Art and although it may look daunting, you will see that it is no different than the earlier drawings you have completed. 

Dive in and surprise yourself.  You are on your way to becoming an Urban Sketcher.

Proportional drawing is a technique that allows you to take proportional measurements of the object you're drawing, and then translate those proportions onto paper. Using your pencil and fingers, you'll mark the width of the object and use that as your unit of measurement — we'll call it "1." Then, turn your pencil 90 degrees and see how many of those units fit into the height of the object. For example, you might find that the height contains two of those width-units — giving you a 1:2 relationship.

Once you've found this proportional relationship, you can draw a rectangle on your paper that matches it, and then fit your object neatly inside. This simple method can help you find all sorts of details as you build out your drawing.

You'll find this first video incredibly helpful in walking you through the technique step by step. Practice by drawing a simple vase, just like I do in the exercise, and then try a couple more simple objects until the measuring method starts to feel natural.

A couple of important rules I don't mention in the video, but that make a big difference:

• Stay seated in the same spot the entire time you're measuring

• Fully straighten your arm each time you measure — otherwise, your measurements won't be consistent with one another

Have fun bringing just a little bit of your "thinking brain" back into the mix with this technique!

Assignment Two of Proportional Drawing brings you back to the second composition you drew earlier as a contour drawing. Now, the challenge is to draw asimilar multi-object composition using the proportional measuring system instead. Watch as I create a unit of "1" based on the width of the glass, and use that same unit to create ratios that enable you to draw accurately. Once you're finished, compare your two drawings side by side — which one do you prefer? A truly great sketch often blends both techniques together.

In this lesson, you will use a combination of proportions to accurately block out the size and orientation of this little dog planter and then contours to complete the drawing.  It is an interesting subject because it in black which really helps you to see the outside edge shape.  Notice how seeing just a few details in the interior of the shape doesn't hamper you from completing the sketch.

In this final lesson, we'll use the proportional drawing method to block out a more complex object found outdoors — a Pueblo Style Architecture building. I'll also introduce the idea of a vanishing point, showing how the building takes on a three-dimensional character as it appears to recede into the background. Vanishing points and perspective will be covered in full detail in another class I teach about Perspective.

And thank you so much for taking this course! I truly hope you found it useful, and I can't wait to see you in the next session, where we'll explore plants and trees, along with shading and shadowing techniques to bring your landscape sketches to life!

Until next time — Marilee