Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
A bunch of funky new sketch related books have been published this year. One that has just been released is by a London based Urban Sketcher James Hobbs' called Sketch Your World: Essential Techniques for Drawing on Location.
I've been a fan of James style for some time, his pared down sketch style is instantly recognisable. Somehow he manages to reduce a scene down to it's bare essentials using just a black and white Sharpie.
The book also features a few other USk friends, Gabi Campanario, Marina Grechanik, Rolf Schröter and Matthew Cencich. Here's a flick through the book thanks to sketcher and book reviewer extraordinaire Parka Blogs (by the way, you can visit his blog for a comprehensive review)...
Sketch Your World: Essential Techniques for Drawing on Location a video by Parka81 on Flickr.
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