Bring City Scenes to Life: Sketching Cars, Trees and Furnishings

Learn to quickly sketch cars, trees and city furnishings to bring your city and travel sketches to life. These elements will add realism and a sense of authenticity to your city scenes. They can also help balance your composition, provide an interesting foreground, lend a rich layer of detail, and tell us something about the city and culture you’re in.

I’m going to show you my professional approach to rapidly sketching each of these important “entourage” elements. Then we’ll pull them all together in a quick, loose, ink and watercolor sketch of a city scene with depth and lots of character. These techniques are rooted in my decades of award-winning urban design work and teaching in university classrooms, Urban Sketching symposia, and travel sketching workshops around the world. This is the real deal.

You’ll learn:

• How urban entourage contributes to a great sketching environment.
• My techniques for rapidly sketching cars, trucks, buses and trolleys that break vehicles down into simple shapes, then progressively add detail.
• Simple techniques for sketching trees in the city, such as sketching branching patterns, capturing the shapes of leafy canopies, and adding shade and shadow.
• How to draw street furnishings and signs that add life and punch to your drawing without becoming overly tight or detailed.
• How to bring these elements together in a believable ink and watercolor sketch with character and a sense of depth, including a fast way to use one-point perspective.

This is a class for all skill levels; my students range from beginners to professional illustrators.  All enjoyed, learned and came away with new confidence, and so will you.  By the end of the class and completion of your project, you’ll have a firm grasp on my personal approach, tips and techniques, and be ready to learn more in the next class. So relax—this is going to be a blast.

To broaden and sharpen your skills, you'll definitely want to check out my other Skillshare classes:

• Urban Sketching Essentials: Drawing People and Crowds Made Simple
  • Whether a novice or seasoned sketcher, this class will add knowledge, detail and nuance to your people sketching skills, allowing you to a new level of life and energy to your sketches.
• Travel Sketching Essentials: A Great Sketch in 5 Steps
  • This class takes a complex urban scene and breaks it down into its simplest shapes, then takes you step-by-step through building those shapes into a beautiful sketch.

Finally, there's a wealth of related classes in SKILLSHARE's Fine Arts category.  It's a doorway to unlimited resources for your creative journey.  For now, let's start with Sketching Cars, Trees and Furnishings!