ILLU5040 - Urban Sketching

Research & Inspiration

 Paul Hogarth - Brendan Behan's New York

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Paul Hogarth was a British illustrator, known for his reportage works, one such series was a set of illustrations made for a book, Brendan Behan's New York (1964), these illustrations are all ink sketches of various parts of New York. There's an interesting mix of detailed work and broader suggestive marks.

Ronald Searle - Paris Sketchbook

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Ronald Searle was a British cartoonist known for his wartime reportage work, the St. Trinian's series, the Molesworth series, and political satire. However, amongst the prolific tides of works Searle produced in his career, he managed to fit in some urban sketches of Paris for a book in the 1950s. Similar to Hogarth's work, Searle's piece are ink drawings of the city but Searle's pieces seem more focused on the quality of line.

Lizzy Stewart - Travel Diaries

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Lizzy Stewart is a contemporary British illustrator known for her work on children's books. Whenever she travels, she brings along a sketchbook and adds to her series of Travel Diaries, there are a range of materials and styles at play in each set of images she creates for each location. I have selected a few pieces that are particularly interesting to me in the way they each convey their depictions of a scene. The use of colour will be something I explore in future works, however, at the moment I am more keen to examine the use of tonal values in these works.

George Butler - WithDraw From Afghanistan

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George Butler is a contemporary British reportage artist, known for his work regarding current affairs particularly focusing on conflicts in the middle east and the fallout surrounding those events. I've selected images from his series WithDraw From Afghanistan (2014) to showcase his approach to reportage artwork, principally the way he composes his works with the use of negative space and dramatically reduced detail to draw the viewer's eyes around each piece.

Urban Sketching In Carlisle

The locations of choice for my urban sketching crawl of Carlisle are those on the route I would walk on the way into university. I've tried to achieve a more loose feeling to my drawings by sketching out only the most basic of information in pencil before jumping ahead into an inked illustration.
Many of the artists' works I've looked at do not have clean and crisp lines in them, I feel like this adds more character to a drawing, whereas drawings with absolutely accurate lines feel a little soulless and clinical.

Fine Liner Sketch of St. James road

An interesting aspect of drawing in the field is that the whole endeavour is more immersive, sitting out in the cold, experiencing the whole subject with a greater perception helps infuse a location's feeling into the drawings done of it.

Another part of drawing out an about in the world is the amount of things moving within the frame, I elected to omit these things in favour of improving my ability to draw the environment rather than trying to include them which would have distracted me from my current goals.

Fine Liner Sketch of the view of Dixon's Chimney from Dalston road

Drawing from a three dimensional reference was very challenging for me, as I found translating what I saw in the world with my eyes down onto a page a very difficult endeavour. This is definitely an aspect I wish to improve within my drawings.

I've always been of the opinion that artistic drawing is the process of translating objective information through the medium of a person, creating a subjective outcome informed by reality.

Drawing with ink & brush allows a much quicker depiction of atmosphere and lighting in these pieces, diluting the ink to open up a range of grey tones helped me create a more moody feel to my work, even when they're produced quite quickly.

My Window View in Fine Liner

The omission of details, particularly in the rooftops of this piece, encourages the viewer to fill in details, using the context of the rest of the piece to inform and suggest.

​Compositionally, it's not uncommon for artists to omit significant portions of their composition to draw attention to specific areas, as in George Butler's pieces of reportage artwork.

Here's a short progression series of an urban sketch based on a scene from Fallout: New Vegas, this was made at about A1 size using a reference image on wallpaper backing paper.

Since this piece was made from a reference image, and in studio rather than out in the field, this illustration is much cleaner and more accurate. Having access to a full range of tools and plenty of time to work and refine this piece contributed to its more polished outcome.