If you have never really attempted to do observational sketching, it can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. This guide is meant to give you some ideas of where to start, some examples to get inspired by and also more outcomes from the research part of the project. Sketching for the purpose of observing and noticing urban landscapes is different from other types of sketching, so this guide will be specifically for this project. Maybe you are already an experienced sketcher and have your own way of doing things, feel free to continue to do so. This guide is essentially a set of instructions to follow my exact approach for those that don’t know where to begin.
What you’ll need:
- Small sketchbook (around A5 format for example)
- Ink fineliner (0.2-0.3 mm is my preferred size)
o Some recommended brands: Artist’s Loft or Staedtler
I found ink pens are very suitable for this exercise as you can lightly sketch in a way that is still very clear on the page. Sketching with pencil can sometimes take more effort to ‘finalize’ and make it feel like a finished sketch. Pens also force you to really think about what marks you are making because of this permanence. Don’t let this concern you, mistakes are still easy to fix and even help you to notice the gap between your ability to perceive something and what it actually looks like in reality. A sketch usually starts with one line that is used as the reference line for everything else. It’s easiest if you can find a straight vertical or horizontal line, but a diagonal is also fine. It is a reference a sit defines in what scale you will be drawing and where everything else will be positioned on the page. It can sometimes happen that you later find out the reference line is not being used anymore or was incorrect, this is not a problem.
The idea of the sketch is that it captures what you see, and you try to not let your mind filter and change the shapes you see too much. To put it another way, it’s the difference between drawing a face or drawing an emoji. Full accuracy isn’t the goal either, but I think the exercise is most successful when you are not actively trying to stylise something into a cartoon.
If videos help you more, Stephen Travers on YouTube may be able to help you:
Stephen Travers Art - How to Draw Natural Scenes
Even if it feels like you have a long way to go, the good news is that this method is more about the process and not the outcome. As long as the sketching process facilitated your focus, it doesn’t really matter if the sketch looks nice (but you might surprise yourself!).
I was able to discover this through investigating the method through workshops and user studies. The first workshop was held at Dutch Design Week 2024 and the second at Circular Society Conference 2024. In total, 29 people participated in the workshops, and 10 people participated in user studies.
At various levels of sketching competence, participants were still able to experience some of the benefits of observational sketching for understanding their own perspective or their environment. Once they started to sketch, many described a feeling of discovering just how much detail they could see, no matter the scale of the drawing or subject.
