From Tight Lines to Free-Flowing Sketches: A Successful Line & Wash Workshop at The Brewhouse

What happens when you stop worrying about getting every detail right and start drawing with rhythm, expression and movement?

That was the starting point for my recent Line & Wash in the Urban Landscape workshop at The Brewhouse, Taunton, where a group of artists spent two hours exploring a different way of looking at, drawing and painting the urban environment.

The workshop was designed to be practical, energetic and, above all, liberating. Rather than simply sitting down and copying a photograph, we worked through a series of exercises designed to loosen up the way participants draw and challenge some of the habits that can make urban sketching feel stiff or overly precise.

Learning to loosen up

For many artists, the instinct when faced with an architectural scene is to concentrate on accuracy. Straight lines, windows, perspective and detail can quickly take over.

So we started by deliberately breaking some of those habits.

Through a series of quick drawing exercises, participants explored ways of making their lines more spontaneous and expressive. The aim wasn't to produce a perfect drawing. It was to become more comfortable with movement, variation and the character of the line.

We experimented with continuous and free-flowing lines, encouraging participants to draw with greater confidence rather than constantly stopping to correct themselves.

Seeing the urban landscape differently

A major part of the workshop was about changing the way we look at an urban scene.

Instead of trying to reproduce everything we could see, we considered what actually makes a scene interesting. Which buildings deserve attention? Where is the movement? What can be simplified? Where can we exaggerate or leave things out?

This is an important part of my own approach to urban landscape painting.

I’m not interested in photographic accuracy. I want to capture the character of a place through line, colour, rhythm, perspective and movement.

Participants were encouraged to make decisions about what to include and, just as importantly, what to leave out.

Bringing line and wash together

The second part of the workshop introduced the wash. Rather than treating watercolour as a way of carefully colouring a drawing, we looked at how paint can work alongside the line to create atmosphere, depth and movement. The combination of loose drawing and expressive washes gives artists considerable freedom. A few confident marks can suggest a building, a street or an entire urban scene without describing every architectural detail. We explored how washes can be applied quickly and confidently, allowing the paint to move and interact with the drawing rather than trying to control every mark.

Drawing and painting with rhythm

One of the central ideas throughout the session was rhythm.

Urban environments are full of rhythm: windows, doorways, rooftops, streets, signs, people, vehicles and repeating architectural forms. Rather than seeing these simply as individual objects to draw, we looked at how they can become part of a larger visual rhythm. The result is a more expressive approach to urban sketching, where the drawing becomes less about recording a scene and more about capturing its energy and personality.

A workshop for artists at different levels

The workshop was deliberately structured so that artists could take the exercises in their own direction. You didn't need to be an experienced urban sketcher. In fact, some of the exercises were specifically designed to help artists who feel that their drawing has become too cautious, detailed or controlled. The emphasis was on experimentation rather than perfection. By the end of the session, everyone had worked through a series of drawings and washes, explored different approaches to line and developed a better understanding of how to simplify and interpret an urban scene.

And perhaps most importantly, there was a real sense of energy in the room

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Bring my Line & Wash workshop to your venue?

This workshop is available for galleries, theatres, arts centres, festivals, creative organisations and community arts programmes looking to offer something practical, engaging and different.

The session can be adapted to suit different groups and experience levels, with a mixture of demonstrations, guided exercises and individual drawing and painting.

The aim is simple: to help artists become more confident, expressive and adventurous in the way they draw and paint the world around them.

If you are interested in bringing a Line & Wash in the Urban Landscape workshop to your venue, I’d be very happy to discuss the possibilities.

To enquire about workshops, demonstrations or artist talks, get in touch.

Loose, Fast and Full of Feeling: My Demo at Taunton Creative Club

Last week, I had the pleasure of delivering a live urban sketching demonstration for around 12–15 members of the Taunton Creative Club, exploring the loose, expressive approach to drawing and painting that has become such a big part of my own work.

I wanted the session to be about much more than simply showing people how I draw. For me, the real challenge is helping people understand how to let go of the desire to make a perfect picture and instead create something that feels personal, spontaneous and alive.

I demonstrated two paintings, working from source photographs to show how I approach a scene when I'm developing a loose watercolour sketch.

True urban sketching happens on location.

Working from a photograph is useful for demonstrating technique, but being there in the street changes everything. You experience the sounds, movement, weather, light, people and atmosphere of a place. Those things inevitably influence the marks and colours you make. I began with my continuous line approach, using a pen to move quickly around the scene. Rather than carefully constructing every building and checking every perspective, I allowed the line to wander, overlap and occasionally go wrong.

And that's exactly the point. The faster you work, the less time you have to worry about perfection.

One of the key messages I wanted to get across was that an urban sketch doesn't need to be a photographic representation of what you see.

In fact, I think trying to make it too accurate can often take the life out of a drawing.

Instead, I encouraged the group to think about creating a personal response to a place.

A loose line, an exaggerated building, an unexpected mark or a splash of colour can tell us far more about the artist's experience of a scene than a technically perfect drawing ever could.

Once the line was established, I moved onto the watercolour.

This is where I really pushed the looseness and began using bold, expressive areas of colour.

Rather than simply copying the colours from the photograph, I thought back to the day I had actually taken the original reference photographs.

It had been hot. That affected how I remembered the scene — and, consequently, how I wanted the painting to feel. The colours became warmer, stronger and more expressive. I wasn't trying to reproduce exactly what was in front of the camera. I was trying to capture my memory and emotion of being there.

That's something I think is really important in urban sketching: colour doesn't just describe a place; it can describe how that place felt.

Working this quickly inevitably creates mistakes, overlaps and unexpected marks.

But rather than correcting everything, I encouraged the group to embrace them.

A splash that lands in the wrong place might become part of the building. A line that wanders off might add energy. A colour that bleeds into another can create something far more interesting than anything you could have planned.

For me, that's where the excitement comes from.

The aim isn't perfection. It's personality.

By working quickly and intuitively, the finished sketch becomes a record of the artist's experience rather than simply a copy of a photograph.

It was a great session with a really engaged group, and I loved being able to demonstrate the process from those first loose pen marks through to the final expressive washes. And hopefully, everyone left with a slightly different view of what an urban sketch can be loose, fast, imperfect and, above all, personal.

Why Urban Sketching Is at the Heart of My Art

Urban sketching has become a huge part of how I make art. It isn't simply something I do when I'm travelling or when I have a spare afternoon. Drawing on location has fundamentally influenced the way I see, draw and paint.

For me, urban sketching is about much more than recording a building or capturing a particular view. It is about being present in a place, making decisions quickly and responding to what is happening around me.

Simplifying what I see

Spend a few minutes looking at a city street and there is an enormous amount of information competing for your attention. Buildings, windows, signs, cars, people, shadows, trees, cables and all the little details that make a place recognisable.

You simply can't draw everything.

And that's one of the things I love most about sketching.

It forces me to ask: What actually matters?

A few lines might be enough to describe a building. A shape might suggest a tree. A small area of colour might tell me everything I need to know about the light.

The process of simplifying isn't about removing the character from a scene. Quite the opposite. It is about stripping away the unnecessary information until you find the things that make that particular place interesting. That way of thinking has become a big influence on my paintings too.

Finding rhythm in the drawing

When I'm sketching on location, I'm not trying to construct a perfect drawing.

I'm responding. The pen moves, stops, changes direction and moves again. I look at the subject, look back at the page and continually adjust my response.

There is a rhythm to that process.

Sometimes a fast, continuous line captures something that a carefully constructed drawing can't. A slightly awkward line can have more energy and character than one that has been endlessly corrected. I've become increasingly interested in that sense of movement and rhythm in my work. I would rather have a drawing with energy than one that is technically perfect but feels lifeless.

The importance of being there

One of the biggest reasons I love urban sketching is that you have to be there.

A photograph gives you information about a place. Being there gives you an experience of it. The light changes. People move through the scene. A bus arrives and blocks the view. Someone sits beside you. The weather changes. You notice a building you might otherwise have walked straight past. All of those things become part of the sketch.

So when I look back through an old sketchbook, I'm not just looking at drawings. I'm remembering where I was and what it felt like to be there. That immediacy is hugely important to me as an artist.

Sketching together

There is another side to urban sketching that I find just as important: the people.

One of the wonderful things about sketching is that it creates an instant connection. You can sit down somewhere with a sketchbook and, even if you've never met the people around you, you immediately have something in common. And then there's the really interesting part. Put a group of sketchers in front of the same building and you won't get a group of identical drawings. You'll get different viewpoints, different compositions, different marks, different colours and different interpretations. That's exactly how it should be.

There isn't one correct way to draw a place.

That is something I try to encourage in my own teaching. I don't want people to leave a workshop drawing like me. I want them to become more confident in making their own decisions.

Sketching and making art

For me, the relationship between urban sketching and my wider art practice is therefore very close. Sketching keeps me looking.

It keeps me curious about buildings, history, light, colour and movement. It encourages me to work quickly, to simplify and to trust a line rather than endlessly correcting it.

Most importantly, it keeps me connected to the real world.

Urban sketching isn't separate from my art. It is one of the ways I develop it.

Every time I open a sketchbook, I'm still learning how to see. And I think that's probably why, after years of drawing and painting, I'm still fascinated by the same things: buildings, places, people, colour, movement and the unexpected moments that happen when you're there.