10/25/2025

Before I put my practice to the true test and attempt an on-site urban sketch, I did one more at-home exercise in the hopes of training my eyes and hands to draw a scene where everything in it was relative in size. Here is a photo I took in:

Reference photo of urban sceene

CC BY-NC 4.0

While sketching out, I ran into many obstacles:

  • Relative size: I used my hands to roughly measure the height and width difference of different subjects in the picture.
  • Clutter: for fear of my drawing becoming too busy, I made some executive decisions on what I wanted to include from the reference photo in the drawing.
  •  Detail: because this is meant to be a sketch, I was careful not to add too much detail. I felt like I was balancing on a fine line between the drawing looking too plain or too boring. 

Here is the drawing:

Sketch of urban sceen

CC BY-NC 4.0

This was really hard! It was also a lot of fun! Looking at the final product now I can see that I could have paid more attention to capturing detail instead of making general shapes only. I also could improve the perspective or the viewpoint . I’m fairly happy for my first attempt though!I am both excited and nervous for next week’s endeavour: a real-time on-scene urban sketch. 

Here is a link to a YouTube tutorial I found very helpful:


Perspective Hacks
Note. Video by David Finch (2021). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcXv_scq6UM

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