5-Minute Sketching: Architecture

Great drawings in just five minutes! Perfect for beginners.

Professional architect and urban sketcher Liz Steel provides expert tips and inspiring sketches to help you learn to ‘read’ buildings and capture them on paper. Relish the challenge of recording urban spaces from the domestic to the majestic in just five minutes!

This book can help artists of all abilities, especially novices, to understand and reproduce real-life perspective in their drawings. The rules of perspective will become instinctive and the artist can focus on the creative: decorative forms, the setting, the mood, the people, and the activity that gives life to architecture.

Featuring a comprehensive collection of expert tips, ideas and inspirational examples of amazing 5-minute sketches of architecture, the bite-sized approach of this book shows how little time is needed to make drawing a part of everyday life. It is an ideal introduction to a rewarding pastime and a new source of inspiration for experienced and lapsed sketchers.

This book is really informative for any art lover wanting tips on painting and drawing buildings. It shows how to simplify drawings to make them easily resemble the original building. The author puts things so as easily understandable. Lots of drawings and examples of what the author is writing about. All-in all a very good informative read. It has helped my art tremendously.

Book Contents

Chapter 1: How to see
Find your story, See simple shapes, Outline the basic volumes, Set out the basic structure, Easy measuring, Basic thickness and depth, Nail the eyeline, Simple one-point perspective, Quick tips for foreshortening, Play with distortion, Simple context

Chapter 2: Quick on the draw
Focus on doors and windows, Simplify details and styles, Have fun with walls, Rapid roof shapes, Simple houses, Capture historic buildings, Easy religious buildings, Quick modern buildings, Rapid tall structures, Simple skylines, Sketch famous landmarks, Capture public spaces, Sketch streetscapes, Simplify shops, cafes and pubs, Capture construction sites, Quick sketch bridges, Simple exterior spaces

Chapter 3: Time-saving techniques
Work small, Use minimal lines, Rapid restated lines, Try thick lines, Explanatory contour drawing, Map light and dark, Simple tonal values, Shade quickly, Hatch and cross-hatch with speed, Catch the light, Play with contrast, Just use paint, Coloured lines and minimal paint

Chapter 4: Speedy supplies
Quick ink, Quick pencil, Quick coloured pencil, Quick markers, Quick paint
Quick watercolour pencils, Sketch first, colour later, Play with paper, Go digital for speed, Sketch off the page

Index