Suhita Shirodkar - The Urban Sketching Handbook Techniques for Beginners: How to Build a Practice for Sketching on Location

The Urban Sketching Handbook: Techniques for Beginners is written with a beginning sketcher in mind. It is not only about the craft but also about the practice of urban sketching and about finding ways to integrate it into your life. It addresses common stumbling blocks, like that big blank sketchbook page thats staring back at you or a fear of people watching you while you draw. It offers ideas and advice as well as examples to teach and inspire you.

In writing it, I surveyed beginning sketchers from different parts of the world with the express purpose of finding out what they wanted in a book. I also asked more seasoned sketchers, including the contributors to this book, for tips and advice they would give a beginner or things they wish they had known when they started out.

Where do you start and what do you sketch? You can start anywhere and you can sketch just about anything in the world around you, near or far. Explore your home, your neighborhood, your city, or far-flung places in the pages of your sketchbook.

Each chapter begins with a Start Here exercise designed to help ease you into drawing from direct observation. Start where youre comfortable and draw what captures your attention in your world.

The advice and learning techniques in this book are multifaceted and might sometimes seem contradictory. Each of us learns so differently that no single point of view is going to fit us all. If there is anything in this book that sounds like a must do, put that down to awkward writing. There is no single correct way to learn anything. Experiment with the ideas in this book, play with the concepts, adapt them, and make them your own.

Sketching is an adventure you embark upon, an unending path. It opens doors to seeing and experiencing in new ways. Finding the time to sketch regularly and staying in learning mode are the two biggest gifts you can give yourself. Enjoy the adventure.

Suhita Shirodkar

A View of Rio

9" 12" | 22.9 30.5 cm; ink and watercolor

KEY I

STARTING OUT

Pens, pencils, paints, sketchbooks, and a zillion other products. Who doesnt love playing with them all? But the choices can get overwhelming. And too large a kit actually makes urban sketching a more complicated endeavor than it should be.

If you think about it, you really need only two things to sketch: a surface to draw on and a tool to make marks with.

Keep it simple and focus on learning to see.

Every once in a while, I sort through my sketch kit and pare it down to keep it lightweight and simple.

SUHITA SHIRODKAR

Sorting through Supplies

8" 11" | 20.3 27.9 cm; ink and watercolor

This is Gabriel Campanarios go-to kit: a ballpoint pen and a small sketchbook. Especially if youre a beginning sketcher, Gabriel strongly recommends