Watch these 10 minutes if you want to improve your drawing. URBAN SKETCHING step by step tutorial

In this video I'll be showing you one way that you can approach drawing this urban scene in three simple steps. I'll give you some tips along the way that will not only help you when drawing from a photograph but also when you want to go out urban sketching. The materials you'll need are a pencil, pen with permanent water resistant ink, watercolour paints and brushes and a piece of watercolour paper. I'll go into more detail about the materials I'm using throughout the video. I'll put the reference picture up on the screen and as you can see it's a house in single point perspective meaning we're looking at it face on so we don't have to worry too much about perspective at this stage. So let's start with step one. So to simplify this drawing we first pick out the big shapes. Here we can see that this house is basically made up of rectangles and triangles. Look at the proportions. Remember this is just a sketch so I'm not going to measure anything but it looks like the front door is roughly halfway across the width of the house and the top of the roof on the right comes about halfway up the triangle on the left. So now let's start by making some pencil dots on our page where we think the corners of those shapes roughly are. Now once we've done that we can very loosely join the dots up to form our basic shapes. When you're drawing angles for example for the roof on the left a good tip is to think of a clock face. For this angle I would say it's probably about one o'clock. Now I'm using watercolour pencil because that way I don't need to rub out my lines they'll just dissolve away when I add the watercolour wash but if you're using a normal pencil that's absolutely fine you might want to rub it out later. It's about halfway across here probably about a third of the way there. Once the basic shapes are there it's entirely up to you how much more detail you add at this stage with the pencil. I'm going to make some rough marks as to where the other windows and doors are. When you're doing this notice how things line up with each other. For example the top of the downstairs windows all line up together horizontally and also more or less with the end of the overhanging porch roof of the front door. Quite often the sides of upstairs windows will line up vertically with those of the downstairs windows but on this particular house they don't. In fact the bigger upstairs window on the left looks like it's more or less positioned centrally compared with the larger downstairs window below. So just keep looking at how things line up in relation to each other. The end of this little garden wall for example comes about halfway up the downstairs window. These dormer windows are not the same size as each other and one is slightly further back than the other. A good tip here when you're drawing things such as windows is to not only look at the window itself but also the negative space around it. This will help you get the size in proportion. This window is smaller and slightly offset. It doesn't actually line up with any of the other windows, not that one or that one. Now I can see that this needs to come down a bit further and then there's a hedge here and then we have our little garden wall. As I said it's about halfway down this window. This one's probably in the middle of this window here. It's all about comparing things next to each other, working your way around and the angle of this about one o'clock between one o'clock and two o'clock. A little bit hard to see what's going on here. I think there's sort of like some sort of post there. I'm just going to leave it at one little pillar. So now that I've finished sketching the rough positions of everything I'm going to switch to pen for step two. I'm using a fountain pen but you can use a fineliner if you prefer. Just make sure that it has permanent water resistant ink. I hold the pen very loosely and use light strokes. Unlike if you were writing you would probably hold your pen closer to the nib. I'm doing the reverse and holding it back here. I don't worry about sticking rigidly to the pencil lines. They're purely there as a rough guide. If something doesn't look quite right then I just correct it as I go along. I'm also certainly not worried about my lines being perfectly straight. I'm not deliberately putting in wobbles but natural wobble will give it some life and character. I don't like drawing that that diamond up there. Unfortunately it caught the ridge of the paper. When you draw windows and doors remember they are solid 3D objects. Always make sure you draw them with at least two lines around the border to show they have a frame. One thing I don't worry too much about is getting the exact amount of window panes. Remember it's a loose sketch. So once I've gone over the main shapes one thing I like to do is add some texture to big areas such as the roof or brick walls. This will vastly improve how it looks when you come to add paint rather than just a big expanse of brown. I'm literally just going to lightly hint at these roof tiles. I certainly don't draw in every roof tile or brick. I mean feel free to do that if you want to, it's your sketch. But I just very loosely draw some random horizontal lines and then add a few vertical lines here and there just to hint at the presence of brickwork. Another tip is to add a bit more shadow to the insides of the window frames. On the windows to our left we'll be able to see a little bit of the shadow here and the opposite on this side. The tops of the windows are above our eye level so we can put a little bit of shadow in here too. It just helps to give it a little bit of depth. Again to show you know these are 3D objects. Likewise under the overhanging roof and fluttering here and also inside here. Now we've got a garden path there, a gate post that we can see through the edge. I'm just going to add a bit of the pavement at the front very lightly. Don't worry if the line breaks up but again give it at least two lines to indicate that it's a curb, it's 3D and it's not just a stripe in the road. I think that's as much line work as I'm going to do. So now we're ready to start stage three. If you use normal pencil and want to rub your lines out now is the time to do it. I'm leaving mine there. As I mentioned before it's a watercolour pencil and will dissolve into the paint so any lines left you just add character to the sketch. First brush I'm going to use is size 2. For the paper I'm using 300gsm cold pressed watercolour I prefer cold press because it has a bit too full texture but you know feel free to use whatever you prefer but I would suggest you choose paper that's at least 200gsm otherwise it's just going to buckle when you apply the wash. I'll start off by just applying some clean water where the sky is going to be then we'll mix up some blue and just very lightly paint that in. Give it some splashes to give it a bit of texture. Don't be tempted to overwork the sky, the less you do to it the better really. My sky is more or less dry so I'm now going to go in and start painting the rest of it. The colour of the house itself, the render is actually quite a tricky colour to get so I want to try and get it exact. It's kind of comes across quite yellowy in the photograph, the yellowy cream. I could just leave it as blank paper but that's a bit too white so I'm just going to mix up a very light yellow ochre, it's too dark, we're going to lift it a little bit. Now it's not paint by numbers so you don't have to worry about going right up to edges just paint it very loosely. That's the rendering done and the garden path is a similar sort of colour so I'll just add a little bit more yellow ochre to that. Next I'm going to do this brick work so I'm going to add a little bit of red colour, a little bit of brown and you can see having those hints of the actual brickwork does help give it a bit more interest and if this bleeds into the render I'm not bothered and I've got a brick wall here. I think there's a bit of brickwork on that shed or outbuilding there and then the path is kind of similar colour to the brickwork just a bit more washed out. So we've then got the main roof I'm just adding some brown to my mixture and then I'm going to add a little Payne's grey to darken it up a little. I'm leaving this part of the roof until last because it is next to the sky which isn't probably quite dry. Just mix up a very light sort of grey in here I'm just going to accentuate bits of the brick here and there and then I'm going to add some green and a little bit of yellow and then mix up slightly darker green come in underneath with it you get sort of a slight gradient if you like and even add a little tiny bit of Payne's grey to further darken it at the bottom where the shadows would be. Now we're on to shadows and I like to mix some blue with some Payne's grey so while I've got that colour mixed I'm actually going to come in with a little bit on these windows just to show they're not one solid block of colour just to give them some sort of hint that there's a reflection there. Now we can paint in our shadows you can see there's a big shadow down here from this sort of overhanging roof you can see the shadow behind that post so there's a big shadow here on this hedge, a door or window, a little bit under this sort of decorative bit here and then quite a lot there and likewise on under these eaves here a little bit under the window ledges. If you want to know more about any of the materials I'm using check out this video here. Thanks for watching!