Marks the end of our outdoor urban sketching session around Manchester City!

Albert Square. Applying a quick contour drawing technique that we learned from the very first Group 08 event meet-up. This was done by one single continuous line (without lifting up the pen).

City Hall Building. Applying a quick contour drawing technique that we learned from the very first Group 08 event meet-up. This was done by one single continuous line (without lifting up the pen).

Being the coordinator of the event didn’t stop us from participating in most of the sketching activities!

Day 04 was another outdoor urban sketching session within Manchester city. The sketching sessions took place at Manchester Central Library, Albert Square and also the Manchester City Council Building.

They were given approximately 45 minutes to stop and sketch within the particular areas. When the given time has ended, group members gathered and walked together to the next point.

At the end of each session, everyone will gathered all lay down all the drawings together for a quick show and tell and photo-taking.

Group member enjoyed sketching outdoor while some others chose to sketch the interiors of Manchester Central Library.

Live-sketching of Manchester Central Library. We had the freedom to use any media to produce sketches. The end products vary from pencil, pen, markers and also water color!

A 30 minutes sketch of Manchester Central Library, finished with a light touch of water color.

Some of the works from today's session with Manchester Urban Sketchers!

Mixed media sketch, pen + watercolor by Simone Ridyard.

Participants are seen scattered around Council Chamber and Manchester Museum, sketching. Everyone is into their own thing, producing their best masterpiece.

The benefits of urban sketching are manifold. At the very least, you will find that boredom becomes a thing of the past, for while a plein air sketch requires a bit of time and organisation, an urban sketch can happen anywhere and everywhere.

My first ever attempt at live-sketching a scene in Council Chamber, University of Manchester. Spent an hour sketching, most of the time trying to understand how to apply the vanishing point technique when drawing perspective. I'm hoping that everything looks proportionate, it didn't really work out well given that the scale is incorrect, but it's a start!

It rained all the way as we walked to the initial venue (Old Quadrangle) and finally decided to do an indoor sketching session in the Council Chamber of University of Manchester and also within Manchester Museum. We had an interesting session earlier today together with our collaborator Manchester Urban Sketchers.

This sums up our Day 02 workshop with Simone Ridyard.

Looking forward to see all of you tomorrow at Old Quadrangle; University of Manchester, for the outdoor urban sketching session with our collaborator Manchester Urban Sketchers! Don’t forget to bring along your own sketchbooks, pens, pencil etc. We will not provide any sketching material. Tomorrow’s session start at 2.00pm till 4.30pm, be sure to arrive earlier so that you won’t miss out any briefing!

Simone has given us a greater insight into perspective drawings and an exercise by giving us approximately 20 minutes to recreate the given image. The task is to re-imagine and sketch the upper floor of a single storey building with the help of a vanishing point.

In graphical perspective, a vanishing point is a point in the picture plane that is the intersection of the projections (or drawings) of a set of parallel lines in space on to the picture plane. It becomes a very precise baseline reference when drawing a perspective.

As the result, everyone came up with various perspective drawing base on their imaginations, with different line weight, line strokes, hatches and different building design!

Archisketcher by Simone Ridyard, this book features two-page spreads presenting the work of artists who have their own interpretations of famous landmarks like, the Eiffel Tower and New York skyline or the neighborhood they live in like San Francisco, Montreal, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

As an urban sketcher you are probably drawn to the architecture and structures in cityscapes. With Archisketcher you will learn to spot and recognize a wide range of common architectural styles and characteristic features on structures from around the world!

Simone Ridyard, the founder of Manchester Urban Sketchers has kindly come in to talk about her deep interest in urban sketching earlier today.

Urban Sketchers is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising the artistic, storytelling and educational value of location drawing, promoting its practice and connecting people around the world who draw on location where they live and travel.

Overall, Day 1 of Group 08 went well!

Some of the group members presenting their personal interpretations based on the combined sketches during Sketch Jam!

One of the challenge was to draw portraiture of some of the group members by applying the technique of blind contour drawing. This was done by one single continuous line (without lifting up the pen) and also without looking at the drawing! It was more challenging when we were given less than a minute to create a portrait!

Facts about blind contour drawing:
First, it improves hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is important in drawing for obvious reasons. Secondly, blind contour line drawing forces you to look at the object that you are drawing. Perhaps most importantly, it helps the artist to understand that representational drawing is all about observation. Without keen observation skills, the representational artist is lost.

Don't worry if you had similar silly sketches like this. Looking at what I have.. It seem absurd, right? All I can say is, practice makes perfect!

Basic sketching demonstration and tutorials by our group member Raden. From simple line strokes to contour drawing, all to emphasize the idea of proper hand-eye coordination while sketching. More update to come!

The morning started with the introductory session among group members, followed by ice breaking session, sketch jam (a sketching game) and also introduction to basic urban sketch.

We had an exciting meeting with our collaborator from Nexus Art Cafe, NQ! She's very much looking forward to provide us space for our activities in the 2nd week.

Our first session will be at room GM224 Geoffrey Manton Building from 9.00am - 11.00am, March 20th. Hope you are all well and see you there!

A photo from our usual meeting last week. We've finalised the last few details and we look forward to seeing you all on Monday 20th!

A late post of the event poster presentation few weeks back on February 16th! We would like to thank everyone for the kind attention during the brief presentation!