Sketch Awesome Project 5

Project 5 – Urban Buildings

I was very excited for Project 5 to come as I like doodling houses. There is something about simple shapes forming cute houses and I like to skip any perspective or proportions just for fun. I tend to imagine what sort of people would live there and what life they would have, as there is a story behind every house..

This week project was split into 2 main parts and one further idea:

Part1 & 2 – Downtown Tokyo

The photo for this exercise was provided by @non_sugar25. Part 1 was creating a building skeleton in 3 point perspective with ink directly without any initial pencil sketch. 

Part 2 was focusing on filling the ink sketch with watercolours. I used Inktense pan paint for the first time on this which I shouldn’t have. I was not familiar with paints and colour mixing was close to a nightmare. Note to myself – always but always do some simple warm up exercises to get to know paints you are planning to use.

Part 3 – Bonus: More Urban Sketching

There were four additional photos of various houses to choose from for the extra practise. I decided to experiment with Royal Talens Designers gouache for the Pink House and Rembrandt watercolours for the rest. The white house was the best as I could barely see anything but still wanted to put far too many details there.

This week summary

• when dealing with perspective, it is a good idea to do a very simple sketch of the overall shape in pencil and then in ink
• watercolour makes ink work look muddy as pigment covers the ink. It is much better to do coloring first and then add ink work to preserve the blackness of ink
• using the “Artistic license” and tweaking the reality showing in photos is more fun
• is good to have a colour pallette in mind up front
• first sketch was meant to be done in a very loose style – this is not for me as I don’t like it and every time I look at it I see chaos and mess (funny enough, my hubby likes it the best)