Gabi Campanario’s long-awaited book, The Urban Sketching Sketchbook: Architecture and Cityscapes, as finally arrived.  Gabi is the guy who launched the urban sketching movement that is now a worldwide love affair and his first book, The Art of Urban Sketching, is still the best tour of the worldwide urban sketching community.

I’ve had this new book on pre-order for quite some time and I was thrilled when it showed up in my mailbox because it’s about drawing BUILDINGS.  Of all the things I draw, architecture is, by far, my favorite.  Architecture just says so much about a city and the people who live there.  And let’s face it, there’s a lot of architecture in an urban landscape.

If you’re a sketcher you just have to smile when you look at this book.  Excepting the beautiful reproduction of Gabi sketches that grace both back and front covers, this book looks just like a sketchbook, complete with the elastic band that most of us very much appreciate on our sketchbooks.  I sure wish my favorites, the Stillman & Birn sketchbooks, had them.

When you release the elastic you find a book that’s formatted similarly to his first book and features not only his sketches but those of many of the top urban sketchers on the planet.

The real meat and potatoes of this book is that Gabi takes on topics such as perspective, composition, drawing organization, simplification, and others while using architecture as the principle subject.  In spite of its small size (5×8 and 110 pages), it’s jam-packed with information for someone wanting to draw architecture.  This, in fact, is a gotta have book if you’re so inclined.  Highly recommended.