Hello from New York and notes for Workshop G

Hello everyone!

I woke up this morning, in a bit of a panic, thinking that I was leaving for Barcelona and had not packed or gotten ready. Luckily, there are 3 more days before I leave.

 Some notes and a big favor:

If you're taking Workshop G (welcome!), I'm posting the sequence and an outline of the workshop exercises to avoid printing (there may be some changes, but don't worry. Also it looks like a lot of walking, but most of our time will be spent in La Plaza Reial).  I'll bring some sheets along just in case. If you want me to email them, or you have any questions, let me know (richard.alomar.la@gmail.com).

And now the big favor...I'm working on a sketching/urban sketching presentation for a professional conference with Jim Richards later this year. I would like to talk with landscape architects and architects attending the symposium to get information on how urban sketching informs their work. It would be great to get perspectives from the urban sketcher group.

Thanks so much and see you all next week!

Richard Alomar

Sketching Urban Place: People, Space and Street (Workshop G)

Instructor: Richard Alomar (New York, USA)
Location: Plaça Reial

Workshop description

Urban spaces are designed by architects, landscape architects and engineers and, for the most part, used and experienced by non-designers. These manmade spaces have been conceived as “Places”. More than walls, streets and trees, they are outdoor rooms for people to move, talk, see and experience: They are the “Place” where life happens.

Sketches and sketchbooks can be used as a way to record these “Places”, beyond the traditional perspective cityscape or ornamental object drawing. Regardless of skill level (something that may take a while to develop) a sketcher can begin to experience “Place” and compose richer, more personally meaningful drawings by understanding the role of spatial structure, personal recollection and observation in the sketching process.

The workshop is structured around 3 activities:

• Connect: Walk around the space. Understand the patterns, forms and urban elements, including people, void space and structures. 
• Collect: Record your impressions of the space informally through words, mental mapping, thumbnail sketching, sequence sketching or other “reportage” formats.
• Compose: Soak it all in. Talk it over with another sketcher. Start to sketch the space as a “Place”: A record of your experience of it. (This can be done in groups of 2 or 3 if needed).

Participants will be given examples of how different elements work in urban spaces and different ways of recording initial impressions. A short explanation session will begin each activity. At the end of the session, rather than laying the sketchbooks on the ground, each sketcher will talk about their impressions and techniques.

Learning goals

Student will:

• Learn the spatial components of urban space.
• Learn various sketching techniques to record initial impressions of “Place”.
• Understand how to frame and compose a sketch to reflect their individual impressions.
• Share with others their impressions and techniques.
• Strengthen the importance of individual expression in sketching

Supply list
Supplies are simple, a sketchbook and whatever you usually use to sketch.

Negative Forms as First Structures and Minimal Storytelling (Workshop S)

Instructors: João Catarino (Lisbon) and Omar Jaramillo (Berlin)
Location: Sant Felip Neri

FIRST PART: NEGATIVE SPACE AND SHAPES

In the first part of the workshop we start explaining what is negative space and how one can recognize it as shapes. We explain the advantage of drawing shapes instead of single lines and why one should treat shadows and reflections as shapes.

Recognizing the negative space

Exercise 1: negative space.
We draw profiles of overlapping objects catching the whole mass and not the single object. We start with an object and then we apply the same principle to people and buildings.

Using shapes

Exercise 2: change the way you look and what you are looking first.
The first step is to approach the drawing through the horizontal shadows
projecting on the ground.
The next step is to approach what is in shadow on objects and buildings in an area.
Modeling surfaces alternating organic and geometric forms.
We can repeat the exercise considering reflections in glass, mirrors or chrome car
as a new starting point.
Do not use previous draft, going straight through the shadows and negative spaces. Try to imagine that your brush touches the surface to which you are looking.

SECOND PART: DYNAMIC SHAPES

Buildings are usually vertical. In theory that is a strong restriction for the composition of the drawing.
However there are some tricks to improve the composition and at the same time stay true to the landscape we are drawing. Use diagonals. Diagonal lines are dynamic.

Exercise 3: Creating dynamic compositions through diagonal lines.

a. Tilting the view: stop treating the page as a window. If you tilt the image you will notice that there is a change in your perception of the drawing. Tip: do it boldly, a few degrees can bring the observer to ask if you made a mistake or you did it with intention.

b. The sky as a large negative space.
Pay attention to the visual limits of the area covered by the sky and look to the forms that intercepts, as electric wires, buildings or tree branches. Choose a color to represent these negative spaces that relate to the sky with stain, and then changes color to represent only the shadows that you think most representative.
Stop making lines you dont see, the figures are expressed in contrast with the background. Use 3 different colors for different subjects such as: architecture,
sky, and people.

c. Using foreground and background: add an interesting element in the foreground to your drawing.
A pedestrian, a traffic sign, a hydrant or text. Fill it with detail and/or color.
The elements you choose should be more saturated with information. Find an element of the background in diagonal with the foreground and treat it the same way:
a window, some detail of the wall, or an advertising sign.

d. Using color dots: you can also add some dynamic in your drawing using color.
If you use an isolated dot of color in your drawing, the attention will go immediately there. However if you place dots of color and position them diagonally (it doesn’t have to be a straight line), your eyes will follow that path. For different diagonal use different colors. Red works best, however you should use it in minimal doses.

Learning goals

• With the experience of this workshop we intend that participants have the ability to focus and stay concentrated closely with shapes that draw from what they're actually seeing.
• Learn how to use negative space, to recognize shapes and dynamic compositions through diagonal lines.

Supply list
Pencils or water resistant pens (i.e. Faber Castell pitt pen sepia), water-brush, watercolors,
Sketchbook suitable for washes (Moleskine, Stillman & Birn etc.)

Other sample sketches

Hither, Thither and Yon (Workshop O)

Instructor: Barry Jackson (London, UK)
Location: Plaça Universitat

The slightly archaic English expression: ‘Hither, thither, and yon’ prefigures recent
concepts in perceptual psychology, which suggest that we experience the visual world (and representations of it) as three layers of space: usually labelled as ‘personal’, ‘action’ and ‘vista’ space. This workshop sets out to explore how we might exploit this concept when drawing on location.

Just so we’re clear: ‘Personal space’ is the band of space nearest to the viewer, extending perhaps 2 metres at most. ‘Action space’ extends perhaps 20-30m further – representing the furthest distance that the viewer could interact with by shouting, or throwing, perhaps. ‘Vista’ space is all the rest – everything that falls beyond the viewer’s sphere of influence.

Research evidence suggests that this perceptual framework of three broad bands is universal to humans, and that particular sets of perceptual cues relate to the different bands. The reason for this may be that the closer to the individual, the greater the level of potential threat or influence increases. The three bands do not have sharp boundaries, rather they merge one into another, but they are clearly distinct. We experience the world as having these distinct bands. When we walk a city street we are intensely aware of things that are close to us or might be approaching, usually less aware of things in the distance. However, when we draw in a city street, we often choose a viewpoint and scope that doesn’t include personal space, or even vista; or we choose to ignore what impinges on our personal space in the marks we make.

Sometimes the inclusion of personal space, or vista, in a street scene, can be a means of increasing the viewer’s emotional engagement with the scene depicted. How can we capture something of our full experience of urban space in our drawing? There doesn’t seem to be an easy answer! Depicting different depth bands in a picture raises interesting challenges of scale, size and detail for the artist.

The workshop does not aim to provide any answers; it aims to ask questions, about how we experience the visual world around us, and how we communicate that experience on a flat drawing. The workshop process that I envisage is:

1. A brief explanation of the concepts, with some illustrations and a chance to discuss them and their implications, including depth cues.

2. Drawing!

Some of the things I would like us to think about when drawing are:

• What are the cues you can use to depict different bands of space (other than linear perspective)
• What is the effect of including personal space in your urban drawing?
• What problems do you encounter in doing so?
• Is it possible to make urban drawings that focus solely, or mostly on personal space?
• Could you make urban drawings that focus on vista alone, with no intervening action space?
• What are the challenges in making urban drawings that depict all three depth bands, and what are the ways that you might rise to these challenges?
• What effect does the shape of your paper, the materials you draw with, have?

(It may be worth having some spare pieces of paper and some sticky tape so that you can change the shape of your drawing!)

3. At the end of the session I’d like to share our drawings, insights and experiences

Learning goals

The aim is not to promote a particular approach to drawing, but rather to make conscious stuff which is often non-conscious.
In learning outcomes terms, I hope someone participating in the workshop will develop:

• An increased understanding of how they perceive the world
• A specific understanding of the concepts of spatial depth and the ways in which it can be depicted
• An increased repertoire of drawing skills to depict space
• An increased skill in using the representation of depth to make engaging drawings
• An increased confidence in the representation of depth

I would like to encourage participants to take risks with their drawings. Our motto will be: ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained!’

Other sample sketches

Barcelona Perspectives: Percepting and drawing Architecture (Workshop J)

Instructors: Florian Afflerbach and Arno Hartmann
Location: Caixafòrum

"You always have to express what is there to see – but above all you always have to (and that's far more difficult) see what is there to see." (Le Corbusier, famous architect, in a speech to students, 1962)
Starting from this quotation, we want to teach the participants to see correctly, which – in the end – means to draw correctly. The workshop is about drawing architecture correctly. It is a beginner’s or advanced workshop.

Sample Exercises

We are using a frame that represents the sheet of the paper. We make sure about our position towards the building we’re going to draw with preparatory drawings. Walking through the city, we’re mostly in a perspective relation to its buildings. A grid tells us about spatial shortening through perspective. With the grid, we’re able to transfer the correct proportions. The pencil can be used to find the horizon, which is important to establish the vanishing points onto the paper. The frame and the grid (and far more other drawing supports) will be attached to a script we hand out to every participant.

Learning goals

• Learn how to see correctly through tutorials about perception, image plane and common perspective drawing.
• To develop a feeling for space and proportions.
• Knowledge about the dependence between viewpoint, angle and composition.
• Perspective skills with 1 and 2 vanishing points.
• Get to know architecture through drawing.

Supply list

Any kind of pencils or markers and water colours, on corresponding paper, in a sketchbook, sketch-pad or single sheets. We recommend to draw on big sheets.

Actors and Stage (Workshop I)

Instructor: Luis Ruiz (Málaga, Spain)
Location: Pla dels Àngels, MACBA

Drawing in an urban context means being exposed multiple stimuli; the city is a complex environment from the visual point of view. You cannot capture on your sketchbook everything that is going on. It is perhaps preferrable to select some story that has caught your attention and is worth to be told.

To reflect this subjective approach of the sketcher, in order to put the accent in some particular subject, we need some tools that help us to catch the moment with economy.

The street and its architecture are the stage, and there each actor plays a role.
And... actors are not always people! A building, a van, a dome or tower can play a role too.

The proposed exercise will be held in a semi-open space in the city where buildings, vehicles, people, trees are interacting. The sketcher would choose some particular feature or story that might be going on in that moment, and find the way to focus on it from the graphical point of view.

The exercise will start dealing with the composition of the sketch: framing the view, selecting what is going to be included and how.

Then, participants will be invited to find a way to highlight the desired parts (colour spots, hatching...) to enhance the storytelling capacity of the drawing. Density of linework and some watercolour splashes can be enough to achieve the goal... But what you do not draw can be as effective as what you do draw.

Learning goals

• Selecting what is important and what can be left out of the drawing.
• Using the empty space of the paper as an active element.
• Capturing the depth of the urban space: Actors play their role in the scenery.
• Avoiding getting lost with the details. Do not draw everything!!
• Leading the watcher’s eye to the desired place of the sketch.

Sample sketches

Life Between Buildings: Capturing the Energy (Workshop E)

Instructor: James Richards (Fort Worth, USA)
Location: Plaça Catalunya

Barcelona’s public spaces—streets, squares, plazas, parks—are world renowned as settings for the city’s rich public life. The focus of this workshop is the public realm that acts as the connective tissue between buildings, where the life of great cities takes place. Here, architecture acts as the backdrop of a stage set, and the “players” in the space—people in motion, vehicles, street furnishings, trees, birds—act in concert to bring life and energy to the scene. How can this urban exuberance and “personality of place” be captured in a sketch without creating a hopeless mess?

This workshop will focus on creating energetic yet visually coherent sketches of “life between buildings,” using a combination of strategies:

• Dynamic composition,
• drawing people first,
• “drawing with abandon,”
• using strong overall shapes, exaggerated perspective and “creative lean,”
• connecting dark shapes to create rhythm and unity, and
• focused use of color to create emphasis and suggest a mood.

Workshop Outline

• We’ll begin with a brief discussion and viewing annotated photos and sketches that demonstrate the visual principles involved in capturing the energy of an urban scene.
• Next, draw a number of the individuals you are observing as a crowd populating the page. This is a technique that can break the tension of marking on a sheet of pure white paper, and can immediately give a scene a sense of life and an illusion of depth. Draw those moving in and out of the scene, with a focus on capturing them in mid-stride. Create an illusion of depth with by varying sizes, overlapping, singles and clusters, more detail in foreground figures, less in the background.
• Add entourage—trees, vehicles, streetlights, signs, bollards, etc., with some of the elements in the foreground, breaking free of the frame, to enhance the illusion of depth.
• Add architecture as a lively backdrop, starting with large contour shapes, then filling in key details (simplified!).
• Add and connect dark shapes across the sketch to create contrast and rhythm, and to help unify the image.
• Finally, add color in a focused way to create emphasis and mood.

Learning goals

• Understanding a successful public space from an urban design perspective in terms of individual elements, their relationships to each other, and how they collectively convey a “personality of place.”
• Editing a scene—choosing what to emphasize and what to leave out—to consciously simplify and communicate our impression in a strong composition.
• Creating a sense of realism and depth through use of perspective, overlapping, diminishing figure size, the “fading out” of detail in the foreground.
• Simplifying complex elements by seeking to capture their visual texture rather than literal details
• Exploring a Cubist approach of walking around a subject, looking at it from all sides, and showing many facets of it in the same picture.
• Developing confidence with short exercises and “drawing with abandon.”

In my view urban sketching isn’t about art, per se. It’s more about authenticity—showing up, being in the moment, honestly recording what’s in front of you, and gaining a deeper awareness and appreciation for the magic of the everyday. Mostly, it’s about experiencing the joy of the creative dance of the mind, eye and hand.

Supply list

• No exotic materials are required beyond what most attendees carry with them:
• Watercolor sketchbook--size per personal preference
• Sketching pencils and/or waterproof ink pens (technical or fountain pens)
• Travel watercolor set
• Waterbrushes or traditional brushes, one large flat, one medium round
• Small rag
• Small plastic container of water
• Small lightweight folding stool (optional)

Sample sketches