11 books
Gabriel Campanario
Campanario is the Seattle Times artist who started the Urban Sketchers blog in 2007 and turned it into a worldwide network, and this 2012 book is the movement’s first big showcase. More than a hundred sketchers from thirty-odd countries, work…
Suhita Shirodkar
Shirodkar sketches out of San Jose and this is the entry point to the handbook series — the one that arrived about ten volumes in, once somebody noticed there was no starting place. Value first, because getting light and dark…
Stephanie Bower
Bower trained as an architect and taught architectural drawing, and this is the tips volume — a hundred and one short entries you can flip to standing on a corner. Materials, then the ones people actually need: How to find…
Gabriel Campanario
The buildings volume, and the one that fixes the most common wreck. Perspective without the textbook: finding eye level, one and two vanishing points, how to draw a street that runs uphill, how to fake a crowd of windows without…
Mike Yoshiaki Daikubara
Everybody draws the lines and then fills them in. Daikubara does it backwards — watercolor down first, loose and fast, shapes and values with no outline, then ink on top once it’s dry, and only where it’s needed. The advantage…
Róisín
People are the thing that stops most sketchers cold. They move, and everybody already knows what a person is supposed to look like, so the errors show. Curé’s fix is to start with proportion and then get you drawing fast…
Veronica Lawlor
Lawlor drew the aftermath of September 11 on the streets of Manhattan, and this is the volume about drawing as journalism — going to the event and reporting it in line. Courtrooms, protests, disaster zones, political conventions, ordinary meetings. She…
Virginia Hein and Gail L. Wong
The volume about sketching the parts of a scene that won’t hold still and don’t have straight lines. Hein and Wong work through trees as masses rather than leaves, foliage in different seasons, water and reflections, rock and cliff, skies…
Katie Woodward
Light is what makes a sketch read, and this is the volume about it. Woodward works through value structure first — squinting to reduce a scene to three or four tones — then the direction and quality of light, cast…
Shari Blaukopf
Blaukopf teaches in Montreal and sketches a lot of wet streets and bare trees, and this is the color volume of the handbook series. It’s pocket-sized and built around one idea: A tiny palette, mixed well, beats a big box…
Stephanie Bower
Less a how-to than a survey of where the movement went. Urban Sketchers started as a Flickr group in 2007 and turned into a global thing with chapters in hundreds of cities, and Bower gathers work from sketchers across those…
