When I am out sketching with the Urban Sketchers, I don’t really fret about my results. Once I arrive home and start looking at my sketches with an overly critical eye, the fun of the sketching event starts to dissolve into frustration.
It seems like I can’t achieve the goals or level of polish I expect from myself once I’m back at home.
I often find myself distracted by details when on site. Even though I approached these two drawings with the strategy of starting big and loose, I ended up focusing on details everywhere and couldn’t reduce things to a single focus with nice depth.
At home, I used coloured pencils to try to create some three-dimensionality and a perceivable difference between the foreground and background. However, it feels like I’m struggling too hard to achieve a believable level of realism, and this struggle is starting to drain me.
Perhaps I should let go of the idea of depth and focus for a while, and see what I can create.
Stuartdraws 
Ah yes, that critical eye can ruin everything! Here’s something that really helped one of our urban sketchers: she would take photos of little scenes around town and then do little grey scale drawings at home with markers, only using three shades. So the idea was to define everything as shapes of light (white), medium, and black. It really helped her urban sketches achieve the depth you’re looking for.
All the best to you, Stuart!
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Thanks, Nora! I’ll give it some consideration. Something certainly needs to change. I enjoy figure drawing so much 🙂
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