On urban sketching

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A wonky-lined church in Finistère, Brittany, France, June 2025.

1 - These past weeks, I’ve been delving into the work of Berthe Morisot. There was a major exhibition of her paintings in 2019 at the Musée d’Orsay. The inaugural lecture tells so many great stories about this artist. For instance, we usually associate Berthe Morisot with themes such as maternity. She does, indeed, paint her daughter Julie often and I love how we can see Julie growing up from painting to painting. But the curator of the exhibition aptly shows that Morisot, for example, paints Julie in the arms of her nanny, so in a way she’s painting a woman at work while she herself is at work. The curator also discusses what women could draw at the time. It’s often said that Berthe mainly painted scenes from private life : her husband posed for her, but he was very jittery about it sometimes. Yet there were not so many opportunities for women at that time to paint directly in the street.

2 - Nevertheless, when she goes to England, there are a few outdoor paintings. On that note, I love how she describes the process of painting outside. We usually romanticize it a lot, but it is very refreshing to see a painter like Berthe Morisot write about trying to do oil painting in a field, only for all the children from the town to follow her, create mayhem, and get her scolded for the mess. She is not a big fan of bad weather or the curiosity of passersby. So she decides to paint from her window to shield herself from those inconveniences. But the passersby are too quick and impossible to capture. She writes to her sister: “From my window, it’s very pretty to look at, but very ugly to paint.” She also tries to paint from a boat: “By boat, it’s a different story, everything is rocking, it’s a hellish lapping sound; you have the sun, the wind…” Speaking of passersby being too quick to capture in painting, I came across a funny anecdote: when Renoir was trying to draw people while working on Le Pont neuf, he would send his younger brother Edmond to talk to them, in order to stall them. He would ask for directions or the time - anything really - just to make them stop and keep still for a few seconds.

3 - On that note, I read The complete urban sketching companion a while ago, and I vividly remember a piece of advice from it: if you can’t fully draw one passerby, you can identify generic gestures. For instance, to sketch “thousands of runners zoom by”, “all runners make more or less the same moves, so it’s like sketching the same person passing by again and again. In these cases, you can make composites of several runners into one”.

4 - The Urban Sketching Handbook: 101 Sketching Tips is also a gold mine for urban sketchers. My favourite piece of advice has to be: “embrace the wonkiness of your line ! tilt it, curve it” (wonkiness = the fact of not being straight). I love a good old wonky line - I don’t like any drawing of mine where my lines are too straight. The book includes very practical and specific tips such as: “blacken small window panes for pop”, “try to keep your hatch marks fairly consistent”. But it also offers advice on composition: for example, you can take a picture of what you see, then look at the photo and notice what immediately pops out to your eyes. Here are a few of my other favourites: “A viewer needs to feel like they can literally walk into the sketch”, “Angling the ground and horizon on your page creates an imbalance that pushes your eye around the page”, “To show something is up high, put it high on the page”, “Multiple views tell many aspects of a story”, or “multiple images in a linear sequence to indicate the passage of time”

5 - This book introduced me to the work of Malaysian sketcher KK, with the idea that a composition can have no particular focal point but simply let the eye wander across the page. One interesting method KK uses is to start on one page and then add more pages as you “grow your sketch.” Drawing becomes a kind of mushroom process, colonizing your sketchbooks.