Urban Sketching from home

The last couple of days I have been drooling over other people's amazing drawings.

I love Liz Steel's travel journals. I love how she draws all her food and drink. It may not be picture perfect, but you can tell what it is with a few simple lines and her use of colour. Amazing stuff.

Her blog lead me to Urban Sketchers, a site run by a group of people who enjoy, as their name suggests, sketching out in urban areas. They go to busy market squares and draw all that's going on there, or find a run down building and draw that. There's a huge list on that site of urban sketchers from all over the world, who are all taking their sketching outside the comfort of their own home.

I've never done any sketches of buildings. I took Art until the 2nd year of high school and we were not allowed out just yet. People who took Art beyond that got to go on cool trips to Bruges and Ghent and draw all day long. (I grew up not all that far from the Belgian border, so those were daytrips. Still annoyed me when my friends got to go on a trip all day long and I was stuck back in school...)

But hey, I've got pictures, right? Lots of them, on my Flickr account. So why not use those?

This is a picture of Fata Morgana, a ride in Dutch fairytale themepark Efteling where I used to work:

and this is the drawing I did last night:



And this is a picture I took of St. Paul's:

and my drawing:



Now I know there's a lot of things wrong with these. I know nothing about perspective, the colours are wrong, the scale is wrong, St. Paul's looks like it's on the wonk far worse than Big Ben is, but I'm doing it.

I've stuck these drawings in my Art Journal because I want to see where I started from. If I keep this up, using pictures already there on my Flickr, I will hopefully get better and better each time. I'll learn how to use lines and what colours to use and if I draw one window this way, the other one should be at least the same size and not a billion times bigger.

And who knows, maybe one day I will be ready to do some proper Urban Sketching. Outside, out in the open where people can watch me...... iiiieeeee....