I’ve only been learning to draw for three years.  I have a long way to go but my goal has always been to achieve the ability to sketch in styles similar to those of Pete Scully, Gerard Michel, and others who sketch buildings in a realistic fashion.  My own semi-cartoony attempts lack their skill with line and color but I’m happy with my results because I sketch more for the enjoyment I get from the process than the actual product.

The one downside of my sketching is that I’m slow…really slow, and that limits the situations where I can apply that meditative, let the brain head off into never-never-land approach.  I spend a lot of time quick-sketching (2-minutes or less) everything and anything to help me learn to see proportions and angles more quickly but the results are far too rushed to satisfy me.

I need an intermediate method – a method that allows me to capture a building or scene in less than 20 minutes, sometimes much less.  And so I’ve been playing around with a quicker, looser style.  I study how people like Marc Taro Holmes and Liz Steel create their magnificent sketches and while my skills are not solid enough to completely mimic their approaches, they are providing me both inspiration and some mental targets for achieving a more loose style.  I’m convinced that I’m only a few thousand sketches away from solving this problem.

Until then, here is a sketch I did while out walking.  It was too cold and windy to sit still for very long and so I quickly sketched this monument that sits in the park near my river.   I did it in a cheap, 5×7 sketchbook of unknown origin.  It’s one that normally sits on my desk and I use it to scribble ideas.  I used my Sailor Profit calligraphy pen and De Atramentis Document Black ink.