Urban Sketching – The Visual Power of Buildings
Urban Sketching: The Visual Power of Buildings
Cities are transient places. Capturing this transience is what makes urban sketching so exciting. The more transient a place, the more dynamic it becomes. This is absolutely true of Ancoats in Manchester, and why we go out to draw on site during our Urban Sketching Ancoats weekend course.
The more static elements of a city, such as trees and buildings, become witnesses to the activity happening around and within them. They absorb the energy of the city and turn it into history and stories.
Buildings have a lot to tell us. They are markers, place-makers and essential to the story of a place. They speak to new generations and visitors and help create desirable communities. We all desire stories – they help us understand our lives; a place without a story can feel vacuous, superficial and unsettling. Stories become the atmosphere, the sense of place we feel and respond to.
This is one of the reasons we draw historic buildings during our Urban Sketching Ancoats course. Spending time on site, recording their character in pencil, pen and watercolour wash, creates a more personal connection with the place and makes the process worthwhile and enjoyable.
Buildings as witnesses to change
We often think of buildings as stable, static, and people as transient, but perhaps we are simply thinking in terms of different timelines. The lifetime of a building can stretch across generations, while the people who occupy and pass through it are present for only a small part of its existence. In this way buildings become a witness to the changing life of a city.
Buildings observe businesses opening and closing, communities developing and moving on, roads changing, transport systems evolving and new buildings rising beside it. Its walls, windows, doorways and worn surfaces become part of a visual record of the lives that have taken place around it. I have witnessed all of these dramatic happenings from the windows of my Ancoats studio overlooking New Islington and Ancoats since 2010.
But, as I have been reminded this month, even buildings disappear, as we know all too well through the gentrification process we witness around Manchester.
When they do disappear, they take their stories with them. Their physical presence is removed from the landscape, and future generations can no longer experience the place in quite the same way. The joy of urban sketching is an attempt to record and capture that presence while it still exists.
An example local to our studio at Hope Mill in Ancoats is the historic Bank of England pub. For generations, it formed part of the local streetscape and witnessed enormous changes in the surrounding neighbourhood. It may not have been an architectural gem, or designed by a famous architect, or have a blue plague on the wall, but its design and architectural features were definitely of the period, never to be repeated. Its presence connected contemporary Ancoats with an earlier industrial Manchester. Now its gone!
This month it disappeared! It’s a reminder of how quickly the urban landscape changes. Once a building has gone, wrenched from its roots, its story becomes increasingly dependent on photographs, written records, memories and of course our drawings.
A photograph records what a building looked like. Our drawings and sketches record something more personal: an encounter with the building.
We, as urban sketchers invest time to stand or sit in front of it, observe it, interpret it. The angle of the roof, the proportions of the windows, the texture of the brickwork, the shadows across the façade and the relationship between the building and the pavement all become part of the experience.
The building becomes more than an object to draw. It becomes part of observed experienced history.
Join us for a weekend of Urban Sketching in Ancoats. It’s a course perfect for beginners and those new to urban sketching
Buildings as the foundation of urban sketching
Buildings are an important practical starting point for learning urban sketching.
They provide structure. Buildings give us measurable relationships between height, width, angles, windows, doors, rooflines and streets. They allow us to develop an understanding of perspective and proportion while also providing an opportunity to explore more expressive approaches to drawing. Who said buildings have to be drawn with straight lines!
This is why buildings form such an important part of our Urban Sketching Ancoats course.
The weekend course begins with the foundations needed to draw convincing buildings. You will be introduced to two-point perspective and practical measuring techniques, helping you observe proportions, angles and architectural detail with greater accuracy. This is not about turning you into an architectural illustrator, but it’s to give you enough understanding of structure to allow you greater freedom and self-expression when sketching creatively in your own style.
Ready to explore Ancoats through drawing?
If the buildings, streets and changing character of the place where you live have inspired you to look more closely, our Urban Sketching Ancoats course is a great place to begin sketching.
The course is suitable for beginners, returners, improvers and intermediate artists, with a small group size allowing plenty of individual guidance.
Explore the Urban Sketching Ancoats course and book your place
Once the basic building structure is understood, the building becomes something to interpret rather than simply copy. This is the time for you to challenge yourself on creating more self-expressive and creative drawings.
Although the Urban Sketching Ancoats course focuses on buildings, particularly your use of tone and shading to bring structure and depth the architecture, composition and colour and the placing of your building within the landscape and how it sits within your page becomes an important second level of consideration. A building can become the main focal point or provide the backdrop for people, trees, vehicles and other transient elements that take place around and within the buildings you draw.
The energy around the buildings
The aim of the course is the starting point to developing your creative-confidence to enable you to make creative choices in how you depict your urban environment.
Cities are constantly changing. People move through them. Traffic flows through them. Shops open and close. Buildings are renovated, adapted, extended or demolished. New developments appear alongside old. This constant change and evolution gives urban sketching its energy.
While drawing, consider people walking past the building and how incorporating them establishes scale. A cyclist or e-scooter introduces movement. A tree creates an organic contrast against hard brick surfaces so synonymous with Manchester’s traditional buildings. A passing bus, parked car, scaffolding or group of people can transform a static architectural drawing into a unique and quirky record of city life. Seek the individual unusual view of the everyday.
Our Urban Sketching Ancoats course will give you the creative-confidence to draw structurally convincing buildings. Your next step is to learn and explore how architecture sits within the wider life of a place and how your style of drawing, your choice of colours, and your choice of composition can tell your personal story of your experience of the city.
This is why composition becomes so important. Your decision to include one building rather than another, to crop a façade, to leave space for a group of people, or to allow a tree to interrupt the architecture can completely change the character of a sketch and the story it tells.
The importance of drawing on location
Drawing on location creates a different relationship with the subject from drawing from a photograph. You have to respond to the actual environment: the changing light, movement of people, sounds, weather and the constantly shifting relationship between foreground and background.
There is also an element of decision-making that happens in real time. A scene can change while you are drawing it. Someone walks in front of the building. A bus arrives. The light changes, rain arrives, football crowds gather, a car parks in front of you. Rather than being obstacles, these changes become part of the experience. These don’t detract from your drawing experience, you need to respond to them – its what urban sketching is all about – reality – not the bucolic romanticism of landscape painting.
The Urban Sketching Ancoats course combines studio tuition with outdoor drawing on location in historic Ancoats. This gives you the opportunity to learn a technique and then put it into practice within the urban environment.
There is also a balance between quickfire sketching and longer studies. A quick sketch can capture movement and immediate impressions, while a longer study allows you to explore proportion, detail, tone and composition more deeply.
Ancoats: the original modern city
Ancoats provides an unusually rich environment for this kind of exploration.
Our studio at Hope Mill is located within a Grade II* listed textile mill, surrounded by the heritage buildings of historic Ancoats. The area brings together industrial architecture and new urban development, creating a constantly changing visual environment.
This makes Ancoats particularly appropriate for a course focused on the visual power of buildings.
Historic mills, canals, and warehouses provide strong architectural forms. Brickwork, windows, rooflines and industrial details offer opportunities to practise proportion and perspective. At the same time, the contemporary life of Anocats and Manchester provides the movement and energy that turn architectural studies into urban sketches.
The area effectively provides a series of different timelines to draw. The historic building may have existed for more than a century. A new development may change the view within a few years, a truck parking in front of you changes the scene instantly, a person walking past may be there for a few seconds.
Urban sketching allows all of these elements to co-exist together within a single image.
Developing confidence outdoors
For many of us, drawing outdoors in public can initially feel uncomfortable. There can be a natural worry about people watching, about getting the drawing wrong or about not knowing where to begin.
Developing confidence is therefore an important part of learning to sketch on location within an urban environment.
The Urban Sketching Ancoats course is designed for beginners, returners, improvers and intermediate artists. The small group size allows plenty of opportunity for guidance and support and is the perfect place to begin your urban sketching journey.
And in Ancoats, surrounded by the layers of Manchester’s industrial past and its continually evolving present, there is no shortage of stories waiting to be drawn.
Discover Urban Sketching Ancoats and book your place
Note: Drawings are shared with thanks to the many students who have attended our Urban Sketching Ancoats course over the years.
