Urban Sketching Instruction: Starting at Blueprint Coffee

Today's Urban Sketching point was Blueprint Coffee.

I wanted to focus today on getting a few panorama style sketches in order to catch the scene. I think it is important to get your sketching done on-scene, even if you take pictures for later as I do. This is because it keeps your sketches fresh and in the moment. It doesn't matter to me too much what the style is, but that the focus is on capturing essential details that make up the scene.  If you get the action of the scene then you can make up the non-essential details later.

This activity of capturing the essence of a scene can be a challenge if characters in the surroundings are moving around all the time.  Just sketch the priority details and if the person or thing in the scene that you are drawing moves, then move on to the next object.

You may even layer sketches on top of each other. I remember a friend Marlene Lewis going over some exercises in her figure drawing session where we drew a figure changing positions over a pose. This is very similar and can teach about motion and intention of the characters you draw.

So is a sketch as such shown here complete? What is the goal? Does it convey what is going on? Could you use any of the sketches to compose a finished painting? 

As an exercise for this week, do some more panorama sketches and capture the horizontally arranged scene.  You could to two or even three panoramas on a page.