The Complete Urban Sketching Companion

Draw the exciting elements of your world with confidence using the tips, techniques, and ideas in The Complete Urban Sketching Companion. Packed with information and visual inspiration on sketching architecture, cityscapes, people, and motion, plus lessons on perspective and adding color, this collection will have you filling sketchbook after sketchbook with compelling artwork.

The popularity of the urban sketching movement has grown worldwide, and it's easy to see why. Sketching on the go is exciting, rewarding, and creatively satisfying. With so many choices of what to sketch and how to sketch it, you need a companion to offer valuable insights, enlightening tips, and tons of ideas and inspiration. The Complete Urban Sketching Companion is that helpful guide to take along on your next overseas adventure, or to your favorite café around the corner.

This book includes key drawing techniques and strategies from four books in the Urban Sketching Handbook series: Understanding Perspective, Working with Color, Architecture and Cityscapes, and People and Motion. Learn how to draw unique buildings, urban landscapes, and lively street scenes, incorporating interesting elements and striking color and lighting. Get tips on sketching with accurate perspective with easy methods and great examples to guide you along. Discover ways to capture motion, whether it's a group of dancers or commuters on the move. Become confident in adding color to artwork by learning about different mediums and color mixing techniques.

In The Complete Urban Sketching Companion you'll also find:

• Simple tools and materials to get started
• Ways to build a well-composed scene
• Techniques for drawing urban environments to scale
• How to construct a sketch in layers
• Tips for rendering different types of perspective
• Strategies for creating dramatic shadows
• How to include a range of color values to create depth
• Ideas for interpreting movement and gesture
• Methods for drawing individuals and crowds

Shari Blaukopf is a Montreal-based workshop instructor, watercolor painter and sketch blogger who loves to travel and share her love of sketching. She's the author of The Urban Sketching Handbook: Working with Color, and you can find her many online sketching courses at learn.shariblaukopf.com. She's been part of the Urban Sketchers community since 2012 and has given many watercolor workshops both on her own and internationally through the Urban Sketchers Workshop Program. Her watercolors are in corporate, government and private collections in North America and abroad, and she's a signature member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour. You can follow her sketches on her blog at shariblaukopf.com or on Instagram @sharisketcher.

Stephanie Bower worked as a licensed Architect in New York City before gravitating to professional architectural illustration and concept design. She taught the how-to's of architectural location sketching for over twenty-five years in New York City at Parsons and in Seattle at the University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts. She has two online sketching classes at Bluprint.com, and she travels and teaches perspective and watercolor workshops internationally, including at six Urban Sketchers symposiums. People around the world follow her sketches online via Instagram @stephanieabower and Facebook, and she is an international blog correspondent for Urban Sketchers. Stephanie is a signature member of the Northwest Watercolor Society. She is the author of The Urban Sketching Handbook: Understanding Perspective (Quarry Books, 2016), The Urban Sketching Handbook: 101 Sketching Tips (Quarry Books, 2019), and co-author of The Urban Sketching Art Pack (Quarry Books, 2017).

Gabriel Campanario is a staff artist at The Seattle Times and the founder of Urban Sketchers (urbansketchers.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering the art of on-location drawing. Campanario's newspaper column, Seattle Sketcher, was awarded first place for blog writing in "The Best of the West" journalism contest. The blog and weekly print column, which combine location sketches and written stories, have quickly become popular in the Seattle area, where Campanario has been featured in TV and radio appearances. A native Spaniard, Campanario moved to the US in 1998 and has lived near Seattle with his wife and two children since 2006. His journalism career spans two decades, working for newspapers in Barcelona, Lisbon, California, and Virginia. Campanario has a master's degree in journalism from the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.