[Music] thanks for joining our live streaming chat we're talking today with is a wonderful the very talented Stephanie Bauer who is an architectural illustrator and urban sketcher urban sketching instructor and she's a lot of color a painter and expert and an author and today she's going to be doing a demo and so it's really exciting and let's just bring Stephanie into the call I think that's good I just I was scrolling through some of the names and I have to give a couple of shoutouts so I see Eileen right off the top from San Francisco I see building my friends here in Seattle who's a fantastic watercolor painter if you don't follow him you should gosh I saw here Brody he he commented yesterday that he wasn't able to get zoom going it looks like he did I'm so glad Pierre welcome from Paris um I saw Rui ruining limb from Australia where it must be 2:00 in the morning I think Rui right so thanks everybody for for joining in on this it's really a treat to get to do this especially when there are so many challenging things happening in the world lately you know to be able to talk about sketching and it's something that brings us comfort and joy and that's a very good thing right about now yeah this opportunity Brenda yeah well thank you Stephanie again second time is a charm hopefully all of our recording technology works for us this time so you're going to be sharing some of your sketches and just talking about your work and giving you lots of encouragement and yeah I find that you know being stuck at home for over three months now I I tend to look back on Oh things that got me to this point and so I started really looking at old sketches and sketches they did a really long time ago and so I thought it'd be useful to talk a little bit about the journey and some of the aha moments I had along the way because I did you know I feel like there were occasionally there were these big quantum leaps and development you know you work your work your work your work and then suddenly boom something something breaks through and and suddenly you're quite a bit better and then you keep working working working working and then boom something another breakthrough happens so I just wanted to show some of the breakthroughs that I had and talk about them so simply should we go to your sketches now yeah all right let's go there okay well these are my mini Moo cards these are actually my business cards and it's kind of a good way to show a sampling of some of the places that I've been in places I've been able to sketch and I just feel so privileged I really am you know privileged and honored to get to teach and travel to all these amazing places so when I get a little depressed I pull out my mini new cards your play card and it makes me happy so these are the little mini Moo cards they're like half size a landscape or invention business parts from move that people order often you see the urban sketches at the symposium carrying them around yes that's true that's exactly and this works really well if you if you have landscape orientation sketches which you do a lot I do yeah that's most of what I do I love landscape proportions so cool so those are my little cards and but if we go back back to the beginning with the next next image this was from little this is a series of three images actually but this is the first one from when I was in architecture school Brenda that black fox came up against our quarry so I took a fantastic drawing class my third year of architecture school a lot of people just took that class for no credit because it was such a good class and it was taught by man named George V Alva meaning going there really popping in and out all over the place I don't know what other people see but yeah I definitely what I'm gonna do is just block the meeting so we won't have any more people joining okay okay and that will help and yeah sorry everybody thanks for your patience yeah so that's 89 people that's meaning and that's enough that's probably all right there we go now that bar should disappear um so um so back to architecture school you know before we entered our fourth year of architecture school we had a portfolio review and three professors had to review each person's portfolio so here am I about to be a senior my fourth year and I've already invested three years in architecture the architecture program at UT Austin and of the three professors two of them wrote week graphic skills oh oh I was stunned I mean and they were absolutely right um so anyway I I was shocked I almost changed out of architecture and thought I maybe I should do something else but instead I thought well this is a good challenge you know I'm not gonna let this get me down I'm not gonna let this defeat me so I took this class from George vetova it was the last semester he ever taught at the University of Texas and it was a fantastic class and it's really the foundation for my own sketching and the way I teach sketching I've expanded on it over the years after through my own experience teaching but George was was really pivotal and life-changing for me so I really struggled in that class and but I was determined and I just kept working at it and working at it and working at it and this was the final you know the final exam we had to do a project and so I sat on Congress Avenue and in Austin and and did this line drawing and it shows how he taught people how to sketch so first the small one in the upper left hand corner is a postcard size right image we work on cheap paper it was cheap newsprint in pen so that you commits to the sketch yeah and don't spend half your time erasing what you draw well uh and so just the essence was in the first 60 to 90 seconds sometimes he made us do a 5 second sketch I mean it was unreal but it taught us to really see the essence of the space and and figure out what the essentials are to capture in in a drawing and you know after 90 seconds or eight minutes you really have a complete sketch right as opposed to having a beautifully rendered portion of a sketch so so and he also advocated for first learning line then learning tone and then learning color the reason being that each time you go from line to tone and then tone to color the level of complexity is is enormous so so first comes line then comes tone and that in color is just so much more complicated so anyway there's my eight minute line drawing and the next one should be my my marker sketch so then we did tone you can see how it's better at line that's the tone drawing so dark Street and then the Texas State Capitol in the in the distance and then the next one is color so at this point can you go to the next one yeah thanks um was color and I think I was really tired it got it got pretty muddy back there but that was the progression I have to say the 98 that you see in the corner is the highest grade he ever dave-o I just was floating after this it was such a motivator and gosh it just it got me sketching and gave me confidence and from then on something that day something clicked and my hand-eye coordination really kicked in and from then on I could kind of you know draw more or less what was in my head you know it's a little like riding a bike you you try you try you fall you fall and then all of a sudden something in your brain clicks and your balance is good and you can ride a bike yeah and don't unlearn riding a bike you might get a little rusty but same thing for sketching it's it's a you know the click that I talk about is sort of like a coordination happening between your brain and your eye in your hand and that was a major click day for me a really long time ago so it holds a lot of sentimental value for me it's I'm so glad I still have those sketches oh very cool I'm you know you're probably looks like you're not even working with the best set of markers yeah I go from weak graphic skills to teaching drawing as a profession drawing as a as a profession and and writing two books on - yeah that's that's exactly the intent so um not long after architecture school I had the opportunity to work in Oxford England and I had a sketchbook and I am I attempted to do some sketches while I was there and I'd kind of I was pretty rusty you know every time I do a trip I have to slog through maybe a week to ten days of sketches I really typically don't like and it's again trying to get warmed up in that and hand-eye coordination back right oh this was in Oxford England and where I was working and this is radcliffe camera which I showed this kind of rough sketch because I'm going to show you this name or similar view again that I did a little well many decades later actually but you can see it's it's a little it's heavy-handed I tend to have a heavy hand so I had to learn how to work with that and that's part of why I use a mechanical pencil now because I do have such a heavy hand so there's radcliffe camera so then I figured out um that if I switched to a smaller sketchbook it might be easier to control so that's in fact what I did that's the first sketch the radcliffe camera was in like an 8 by 10 sketchbook and I just couldn't control it very well so I thought well maybe if I work smaller so then I switched to a sketchbook that was um maybe 5 by 7 and the most and and again something clicked and suddenly because I wasn't having to deal with the detail I could just just kind of it was it was easier to control the sketch and I had more success that way so that's why I always encourage people when they're starting out to sketch just sketch small I love that about Gaby campanario because he has this sketchbook he literally puts in his pocket and carries nothing but a pen right he does masterful sketches so small is faster small is easier to control so work small at first that's intimidating as well I think right yeah yeah exactly that big blank piece of paper is intense so uh fix is saying that it amazes her how you can work so small and gets less detail in there yeah well yeah little dots you know are suggestive of detail and there's really not too much detail in the real drawing but it kind of suggests it and then the brain your brain contributes to to seeing that d right the same for the clears later it says 2018 but it was in 2018 I'm not sure why says that and this was I think the following year and you can see the difference going from that Oxford sketch to to this and then this is also in a bigger sketchbooks so once I kind of got comfortable with the small sketchbook moving to the larger sketchbook was an easier jump to make so and then I found there was more information that I wanted to be able to get in so I was I'm in that detail the Big C was talking about I was able to get into the larger sketchbook but it was a progression I had to work up to it so small sketchbook not a whole lot of detail then eventually larger sketchbook where I could capture more of that detail right go here to sketch next year Brenda where is this one this isn't Seville oh uh oh gosh and you you're gonna ask me that and I'm drawing a blank on plus of this Funyun I think it is Oh thumbs Lawrence of Arabia yeah right yeah the architecture in Sevilla is fantastic I really hope were able to travel by by May next year yes and we'll talk about this a little bit more at the end but Stephanie and I have a gorgeous travel workshop planned in Seville for next May 1 to 5 and we're just hoping that the coronavirus cooperates with our plans so we'll see yeah yeah okay next one so this this is from a camping trip i I had a decades where I really didn't do much sketching at all and I saw the Marilyn Deering hi Marilyn is on this this call the zoom call and she was on this camping trip and my friend Mark smedley another architect who draws beautifully said come on we're gonna go sketch and I had no equipment with me hands me a piece of paper an old paintbrush that you know it's the kind your your kid would use in school and and some water colors and so I satin did this this view we both you both sketched and this sketch wasn't a breakthrough so much as it got me sketching again it realized how much I really enjoyed it and and so I I just I kind of picked up picked up sketching again about with with the sketch so thank you to mark Smedley my good friend and hardly any line working here just part of the evolution so here's another one it's 2002 another camping trip I literally had like five-year-olds climbing all over me as I'm attempting to do this and this is very near Seattle at Rosario Beach and I was determined to to try and do painting again when I could so this is a small little sketch on cheap paper and but it captured the bat backlit seen at Rosario Beach and I remember the kids climbing all over me it's kind of amazing what comes back yeah well it's true when you're sketching and all you remember everything and so people if you want to have Stephanie a question you can send me Randy Murray a Facebook message and I will read it out Wow so then we jump to India a country that I love and my parents lived there before I was born and so for me is a little like the salmon returning home and I when I go to India I'd always wanted to go and I had the opportunity in 2011 to go with my friend Nancy for Anna and and I was determined to go in sketch so you know I I realized with kids and work and just so much going on in life all of all into your stuff I I really didn't have time to pursue my own sketching so I hear a train someday it'll be a TED talk because it's kind of an interesting story how I got to India but and this sketch was a real breakthrough for me this was in a big molesky news sketchbook it's sketch is enormous it's probably 20 No 24 inches wide or something really huge and we found a spot to sit where most people wouldn't wouldn't bug us too much I was up high and and I thought I would do this sketch and I remember trying to make these long horizontal lines go across my page and I just couldn't control it so then I remembered I have a straightedge so I pulled out this little triangle I had with me and suddenly was able to snap these really long horizontal lines with with accuracy and and without having to mess with it and and erase it and do it again and so this is the first sketch that I did that used a straightedge and and I only had two colors it's a raw sienna and a cerulean so I used the colors to kind of create a focal point at that building towards the back in the center and so so this was a breakthrough for me it was enormous it it captured the whole scene I write notes on the side so that I don't because I have a tendency to forget some of the details and and then when I got home I found out about this international competition called the K Rob and I submitted this sketch and it won for a best sketch and that launched a whole whole other range of things it's basically starting in 2011 was like this giant wave that was that was starting I could see it off in the distance and I knew it was gonna be a really good way for for writing so I'm still on that way for you Brenda yeah and a big backpack tool meaning the the triangle tool for the game changer for me she says oh that's great so glad to hear that thanks from Appetit all right I love how you kept all the solid buildings anything that solid is is just in the white and then the sky and the water yeah thanks I mean I you know most of the drawings I do or one-point perspectives I can really milk a one-point perspective get the most out in 2013 I was awarded a fellowship to go study in France so this was at the very beginning of that trip and I it's funny because I used to lie awake at night on that trip and think I got my appendix figured out I'm a pencil person and this was one of these sketches that that allowed me to do that I'm sitting at the Sun and the tuile early and and did this sketch and you know never in a million years what I've imagined it would be on the cover of a book so anyway it's a lot of sentimental value to me it's a one-point perspective this was where I first really started doing these light buildings and darker skies and blackened into little windows and and started using a mechanical pencil my first mechanical pencil I bought it's in in the a in Paris and and I I keep buying that same brand because I'm afraid to switch Tiffany it's your lucky pencil so much luck and so um do you ever erase like you have an eraser in your sketch pad I do I use it infrequently um I only use it at the beginning when I'm setting up the basic line work you know those big shapes that I talk about in my classes and if I need to move over the shape or lower the shape then I'll erase it but the most part then I I put it away and I just draw through everything actually you really don't even need to erase much at all right and so I see that you've left all the guidelines in here and so it doesn't look like you did much erasing them all no no which which book was this on the sketch on the front cover all this is understanding perspective my first book from 2016 no part of why I put it on the covers because everybody loves Paris you know I get a whole lot more variety of line with with pencil I can do very very light barely visible lines I can do really dark lines I can vary the line super easily as I'm drawing the line I can you know bare down make it darker and make it lighter make it thicker make it thinner and so I feel like I have more control and then for me my pen drawings I find end up looking kind of cartoony and flat so there are times when I like pen but in general I don't use it very much because I I just like the variety and I think you know with the pen I always feel like the watercolor is sort of like a coloring book I'm just filling in a lot of the the shapes whereas with this if my goal is to get kind of a happy balance between the pencil line and the watercolor so that neither one obscures the other my gosh that's an interesting way of explaining it very helpful you know it's not interesting how they're the urban sketches out there who swear by their foodie sailor bent nib pens yeah fountain pens and other people who just splash the color on and and you know we've never touched a pencil and you know they're all gorgeous now I have a deep appreciation for this pencil work as well it's just really beautiful yeah I mean I admire the people who are working in pen and it's something I aspire to and I I try sometimes I keep thinking I'm gonna do it but in the end I just I love the pencil I love the tactile quality of the pencil on paper I I just yeah I have a question here for you from Paula she says do you ever use water soluble graphite I don't I I have it but yet to actually use it there's another thing on my list of things to try um you know I think for me that issue would be how it works with watercolor I think you have to kind of make a decision probably between one or the other um I don't and and then the grout water soluble graphite would paint all the paint's in my palette so I'd have to have a and it's something I want to try I literally pull it out I carry it with me because I'm like oh yeah the perfect moment for that water-soluble pencils gonna come up any moment now so but no I have yet to try it but I really want to yeah so big sights that she agrees with you that the pencil work make sure your work really stand out ah thank you that's so nice I love all these messages thank you so part of my project on with the Gabrielle prize um for that fellowship in 2013 was to study the use of perspective in in the gardens that both are sigh and another shot so volu be calm which meant it ended up being my main project was was there and let me apologize to anybody from france listening to like i bad French I am really apologized but this was a real ground like I opening sketch for me you know the premise of that fellowship it's awarded to one architect in the u.s. each year and I just oh my god I think my lucky stars that I happened to get it in 2013 and the premise is to learn about architecture by sketching on location by actually drawing it you when you're standing right in front of the building or the space that boy was that perfect for me so that three months and in France was a time when I had no distractions I didn't have to worry about money I could just draw and develop my own drawing style and and way of thinking with with a pencil in my hand and this sketch was was really significant because um you know there's an advisor with this fellowship and he kept saying just you have to start sketching because I was doing so much sort of book research he said no no no just go out and sketch just draw so I went out and I'm you know standing at the top of this incredible axis at Versailles and and I'm pulling out my pencil to measure the angles and I'm trying to figure out where the vanishing point and I look and I realized where I'm standing I don't know if you can tell from the sketch but the vanishing point is literally up ahead of the statue in the water at the distance yeah and and that statue of Apollo who's the Sun Sun God and he was the symbol for louis xiv who called himself the Sun King and so I realized Lenora who designed these gardens had manipulated the landscape to literally you know kind of force our perspective show that statue in the distance of his head and the notes were really understood perspective and worked all kinds of things into his designs that manipulated the perspective to kind of choreograph the experience through the gardens so I'm this was like one aha moment after the other I mean it was just incredible and so this is a really important sketch to me and my evolution I love being there and a great revelation for the queen of the one point perspective - yeah funny so Leslie is asking how you keep your pencil lines from smearing inside your sketchbooks they do smear but I've learned not to move my hand across the paper too much so and I'm right-handed so I block out the shapes really lightly in pencil so they're barely visible a lot of those I end up smearing away by the end of the sketch but and then I work from left to right so once that line work is in I start on the left-hand side of the sketch and then work Merc moment my way across to the right that minimizes the amount of smearing on the paper no I don't cool so our Doug is asking if you use a limited palette you know not intentionally but yes I do have a pretty limited palette I use French ultramarine I friend Mike for core colors of French ultramarine Windsor Newton French ultramarine Windsor Newton burnt sienna yellow ochre and permanent alizarin crimson and I can do pretty much any sketch with those four colors here I also had some SAP green but I doctorate I knock it back with the burnt sienna and to make it less intense and bright and then I also use some new gamboge to brighten up the green so that you can see that plane and then right in front of us I start with some new gamboge and then I start to drop some of that altered SAP green and then at the background I'm dropping in Blues like hey could you repeat that last color which I've never heard of that color before new gamboge yeah it's a warm yellow okay can you spell it uh well new okay and then D a.m. B as in boy o GE new gamboge similar to a hansa yellow medium something like that okay I'm not always totally happy with new gamboge I'm still on the lookout for the perfect yellow oh I think I have another question for you so Lessig's asked me after sketches done do you preserve them somehow she says hers blur afterwards she the sketchbook page is rubbing against one another I do not if there's something I really want to preserve I put a light wash over it so you can see where it says view of green carpet toward Grunk canal at the bottom where I signed it there's a very faint wash of kind of a grayed out yellow ocher and once I paint that it's basically like dirty water once I paint that dirty water over my pencil work it fixes the line and I literally can't erase it out no that's right that's a trick if you put water over pencil you can't erase it after that yeah it gets a little darker and also it fixes it to the paper so if there's line work I really want to preserve I will put a light light wash of kind of a gray yellow ochre yeah well I was the gorgeous sketch I thank you I've heard that the yellows somehow are better for fixing the pencil work I don't know why maybe it's sediment in in the yellow ochre a couple more questions Betsy says Stephanie oversee sketch of particular was very bowls art style illustration feel to it did you study those types of illustrations I did I didn't learn how to do them but I certainly admired them and looked at them in architecture school yeah for sure I mean they inspired generations of architects mm-hmm and Doug says he needs to order your book on sketching tips and we will talk about your book a little bit later so yeah all right let's see what else we have here oh wow now going the other direction yeah so this is that same time in Paris it was I was walking someplace else started to rain so I just turned and went in the open door at notre Dom mm-hm and sat while there was a service going on and and did this sketch and boy am I glad I did yeah yeah I mean you know this this was this sketch was important for a lot of reasons but I think as I look back on it now you know after the horrible tragic fire I mean we were so many people around the world were obsessed so upset by this and I realized I too was extremely upset and I I realized that the things that we sketch really become part of our DNA and it was the phrase that I used the when the the fire happened and it's because you know looking so carefully you really absorb the information in front of you you know some people sketch to make beautiful arts and that's a fantastic thing to do but that's not my purpose for sketching I sketch to really learn about what I see so I you know I'm counting those those days and Counting the columns and looking carefully at the windows and and you know my my sketch in the end might be a little not terribly precise but but I remember what I've looked at and drawing though for me sketching is a learning experience I think your your sketch itself is more precise than a lot of people so yeah and you also captured that moment in time right which is important because probably the ceiling will never look the same again even after they repair it yeah well we'll we'll see what happens but but yeah you know this this space is and this sketch is near and dear to my heart yeah and I think for many around the world then that same summer I did my first trip to Chiba Taliban origin in Italy and this was not long after my um I think it was after my no trauma sketch maybe not I think it was and this is my first wide-angle yeah so which became something of a signature and I love sketching church interiors for you know it's when it's super hot outside you can go in and it's cool it's quiet there's often a place to sit and it's it's calming and you can kind of recharge and I also really love the challenge the perspective challenge of doing these drawings so this was my first wide angle so you can see how the center portion of the perspective is normal kind of straight up and down verticals but as you get to the to the edges of my cone of vision I start gradually angling the the columns those vertical lines to a vanishing point that's way above three perspective yeah yep and and that gives the feeling of being in the space which is why why I did it just makes us feel like we're you know we're right there well you know it's a sketched so I've taught this this would have been my eighth year to teach workshop in in chavita and it's typically been a five-day workshop this would have been a six day workshop and by the fifth day everybody's in the church doing this drawing cool yeah so we work our way up to it yeah this is that same town I had a fellowship there in 2014 this is the first time I picked up this large pad I could happen to throw it in my suitcase at the last minute and I ended up doing all the the drawings for my fellowship the Chi Vita Institute fellowship study on this this big paper so that was again you know working up to that larger size this kind of started to work really well for me for some reason and and what I in addition to the drawings and getting those in for me the triumph of this sketch was the variety of color any surface so it's just tricky you know this was a very hot dry climate so I had to work really quickly because the paint dries so fast it doesn't have time to kind of move around on the paper but to get this shade and the shadow and this some variation in color was a triumph for me so I love this sketch my favorite part is that little arch under the stairs on the right hand side because I got that glow billhook if you're still on this zoom call I learned that from you well for me so I I mix it a kind of a purpley grey with my French ultramarine and then I drop some daniel smith quinacridone burnt orange in where i want that glow on the underside of that arch and that that color works like magic it's very similar in hue to daniel Smith I'm sorry to Windsor Newton burnt sienna but it behaves differently so have people get both wow you know the thing I love about the sketch two things one is it looks like you've mixed the color on the paper not on your palette like there's no solid colors here right and also all the white that you obviously deliberately just didn't let your paintbrush touch you just left these chinks of white and gorgeous yes thank you so much for that and I have to say you know the hardest part about painting is where you don't paint so but yeah leaving bits of whites from for most of us especially in in a sketch is is really important reserving that white of the paper to add sparkle and a sense of light and I far the hardest thing to do because you get caught up in the painting and you want to just cover everything so it's a kind of plan ahead of time where yeah no way thank you then this is on another trip um this is looking toward the cathedral in Orvieto I arrived in Oregon so I was super jet-lagged and then I panicked because I realized I hadn't quite broad enough paper I had this pen talaq sketchbook this is the nice is that it's probably about eight by ten maybe I don't remember exactly um and I thought oh I know what l2 I'll do several images on a page in that way I won't run out of paper by the end of my trip so I did all four images in one day with heavy jet lag I really liked it and it became something I did in every city I now go to when I have this sketchbook I'll do a series of for street scenes Oh something not always in one day but um I'm jealous of your vehicle trip because I wrote about more viento in my master's thesis but I've never been there oh I hope you get to go it's a it's not very far from chavita so often the workshop groups will get to roam and hightail it to Orvieto and then i'll meet up there and then travel by taxi together to achieve eaten so this Oxford I had the opportunity to teach a workshop in Oxford in July of 2017 this is that same Radcliffe Camera but you know decades later so it's it's interesting to see how my hand has developed how my drawing style has changed and um you know how I just it's nice to see an evolution in one's work so this is my this is in that same pen talaq sketchbook and anyway so if you could go to the next one it's kind of puts the two images side by side a usk talk that was also recorded and and you can watch it on their youtube channel and also on their Instagram TV page but and then there was a challenge each of the instructors who does a talk pose as a challenge to other urban Skechers and mine was to go back and look at your look at your work from when you started sketching to what you're doing now so this is my then a noun side-by-side and it's it's a big difference yeah more accurate it's it's got color for one and I pretty much taught myself watercolor it's not something I learned in school right yeah very cool beautiful it's just a comment from Paula who said Stephanie your handwriting is always so pretty and did you learn it in architecture school was a really good question that's something who knows fellow architects who knows how architects right you know we do kind of adopt a way of writing in architecture school at least we did I don't know if they still do because they're all on computer all the time so I would say it it did influence my handwriting yeah but but it's still still my my handwriting do and the reason we all learned how to learned used to learn how to do that architectural block lettering was so that because you had multiple people working on any one drawing and the idea is to have similar handwriting so that there was consistency from when one person drew on the floor plans and then another person you know change something on the floor plans so that there there was some consistent consistency in the lettering the Arctica block lettering but we also learned kind of a script handwriting as well that was more casual that was definitely has an architect's feel to it good one I want to ask you about the purple and I think it's burnt sienna that I'm seeing in here is it a question of doing a wash of the purple and then sort of charging in with adverts you know afterwards that's yes that's exactly right um and this one you know is very much at the end of the day and those colors are actually pretty pretty accurate it was there was this beautiful golden light on the white buildings in Dubrovnik this was last September at the very end of September of 2019 and and then there are these deep dark shadows over most of the ground I mean normally I try and leave some white of the paper on the ground but I literally remember sitting there with my paintbrush charged with this is very dark violet purple gray and thinking do I want to do this do I do it really let me go into this sketch with this really dark cover and color and cover up most of it and I and I literally said to myself Stephanie go big or go home yeah so I put that brush to paper and then just wash straight through from one from the left to the right and and I end up really liking it alright so I have question for you from what stage did you put in the people it was it after the wash no the people go in there you know they're all in in the line-drawing so I just painted right through all the people and then darkened a couple and left a little white on some of them but it's a fantastic effect just seeing the building through the people because people move all the time anyway so it's kind of like that yeah that's a really good point it does tend to feel like um like the like the people are moving you know for me with my background as an architect I I like I mean uh I really love drawing buildings I really envy the people who can do just fantastic sketches of people especially people in motion but for me I really just add people to give it a sense of activity and a sense of scale they're not the focus or the purpose of the drawing they're they're telling us how big these buildings are and they're kind of animating a space yeah cool yeah we can go to this one and then this one this one I really liked i sat right by a restaurant the waiters kept coming over and looking over my shoulder and critiquing it as I was doing it mm-hmm and sat on a little stool missed the crowds and I like this one because I I've kind of finally like in that chavita sketch I finally got the feel for the place so I'm I want to make sure that in in my sketches I want to change the colors I'm from one place to the next I don't I don't want it I used I don't use the same same approach to colors in Mexico that I would in Dubrovnik right so so you know I don't want the style to overtake the information that I'm trying to capture so and and the buildings are more or less white the white and the ground too so it was hard to get that color and also get a sense for all this light that was bouncing all around no reflecting off of one surface and onto another and so I was thrilled that I actually kind of got what I thought was a good quality of light um that captured that quality of light yecchh now the waiter kept coming by and looking over my shoulder and he said it looks like there's snow and you need a taller stool they would find a way yeah but you know I really wanted to leave some some white up there cuz again I you talked earlier about reserving the whites and for me I really wanted to leave some white so and there was white stone up there so what the heck yeah cool and so we're gonna talk about your books but when we wait to the end and go to your demo sure yeah are we ready for that so I think we're really excited to see your demo are we ready to go ok so I'm gonna I'm going to talk a little bit about my approach to starting a sketch so some people would start with that doorway and you know it's interesting because that is kind of the focal point of the sketch it's dark it's clearly that the entrance to the building it's what the architect wanted you to see but it's hard to control the size and the proportions if you start with a piece of something and another approach people might do is they want to start to work from left to right for one that's how we read so that's kind of a natural way but again if you start with a piece it's it's much harder to work the proportions and and and well basically to get the proportions right and get it located on your paper so it all fits in those lovely towers are not off the paper so instead I use what I call big shapes so when I look at that scene the first thing I know Otis is this big shape on the on the building this is in Dan then Hawk I have family in Holland and this is the Ritter Hall and the in the bin and off the center of government for Holland so that's kind of the big shape that I see and it's almost as perfect square so squares are super easy to draw and because the proportions are easy to get so if you find a square consider yourself lucky but that's basically the first thing I I would look for is the big shape that kind of defines the sketch right the next thing I'm doing is trying to locate the vanishing points so I in in the real world I'm doing this with a closing one eye and using my pencil to extend those lines that are vanishing away from us to find where they converge yep on a photo it's it's easy you can also take a picture and do it on your phone in your phone app but in market mark up a picture so you'll notice though that I have what's turning out to be two vanishing points yeah and that's because the two sides are not parallel to each other so it kicks up a second vanishing point both those vanishing points are on my eye level line yeah just what I'm about to draw in with that straight edge right so there's the eye level so those those are basically the steps that I teach people I don't I don't know anyone else who's come up with this it's kind of something I made up in the process of writing and writing the book well in teaching workshops and in writing understanding perspective so the first thing is the big shape so that equilateral triangle on top is also one of the big shapes the second thing is to extend the lines so you get the vent to the vanishing point and the third is to draw your eye level line in all the way across the page there are lots of benefits to that and but and I'd write about those in the books know how I would start I start that on a piece of paper unholy start with one edge a vertical edge and it's often the left left side for some reason I don't know why and you'll notice how I'm locating it on the paper it's not in the middle it's slightly to the right of Center and it's lower than it is higher because I want to be able to have some sky and get those towers in without them you know going off the top of the page this is the point where if I make do something I don't really like I will pick up my kneaded eraser and erase and start over like maybe I would need to draw that square or lower on the page I would erase it and just put it lower on the page I haven't invested much time in my sketch so it's super easy to make changes at this point yeah and you're holding your pencil very loosely yeah and they're very light lines I was worried they wouldn't show up at all so so I've got the big shapes the vanishing points and the eye level line and once you put those three things in you really have everything you need to complete your sketch once you have those vanishing points in you use them to draw your lines and that's where the straightedge comes in handy or you can just practice making radiating lines on a big sheet of paper and your hand will get better so so there's the main shape in now I'm going to start adding some of the information on the side in perspective going to that banishing point we've got some of that roof in so there's no detail at the beginning it's just really blocking out the big shapes right and now this is not a mechanical pencil no and that's a good good point I didn't use a mechanical pencil because I knew it wouldn't show up on the screen I needed something with a slightly thicker thicker line in order for everyone to be able to see it [Laughter] so yeah I'm using just a regular pencil but normally if I were sketching in the field you're right I would have my 0.5 mechanical pencil with to be led in it so you'll notice there's a horizontal line you go back and look at the look at the image and it's about 1/3 third of the way two-thirds of the way up so you see the little tick marks I made on that initial vertical I drew I divided it just visually into thirds and for the top third I drew that line and that helps me accurately place the the round window now the fountain is going in and that's a series of ellipses with the fountain in the center of the ellipse and that just takes practice getting that in normally I would try and draw the entire ellipse because it's much easier to draw the full shape of the ellipse instead of just a piece of the ellipse but um so you can see all of the basics are starting to go in now I add a couple people for scale oh my gosh I'm loving looking watching you do the people really interesting most of the heads align with my eye level line even though I'm sitting and kind of fudged that a little bit and draw them most of the people in my at my eye level line so there is the final sketch that I did i sat with my friend marlane Dan brink oh wow the Dan half urban Skechers and we just laughed and had the best time it's just it was just wonderful to be all mm-hmm sit with her and have this really relaxing fun day on this bench and within this beautiful scene and get to do this sketch so it's really one of my favorites I remember how much fun it was in a way that I liked which is doesn't happen right well thank you so much Stephanie for sharing all those fantastic sketches with us and your demo this is the other book this is the first one yes which I think most people have and to my amazement I still see it in the bestseller list in its category on Amazon four years later so this is the two of them yeah understanding perspective and then 101 sketching tips this book came about because I didn't go to the symposium on portal instead I was teaching at a symposium in Taiwan called Asia link which is a fantastic symposium I I loved it had the best time and so I thought for all the people going to Port Authority Riis of blog posts I do have a new blog it's called drawing perspectives calm ha ha and so I decided to do a series of blog posts to kind of help people with their perspective before the symposium and I found myself waking up in the middle and I grabbing my phone saying oh I could do a post about that I could do a post about that so after I did the 10 posts I the list just kept growing until I had like a hundred and fifty 175 things that I I wanted to write about and so I contacted the editor and said what do you think could this be another book yes another one but there was yeah 101 sketching tips and it's fabulous and you've called on a lot of other early sketches to help as well right yeah you know I spent a lot of time combing the internet I tried to find especially for the second book people who you wouldn't have already seen in other books so a lot of people that I met in Asia for example when I went to Asia link so yeah it was it was fun putting it together it's all it was like a serious hurting of cats around the world it was really telling but so there are so many talented fantastic artists and Skechers out there it's it's it's kind of overwhelming you know I just and then when I'm around them I'm like when I'm sketching this sugita for example or Marc Holmes I I'm like oh you kind of pick up their energy once trying to emulate them and so I don't know I just had to try and stay in my lane and do what I do what you do so well I just I see on my list here that Ben yellow whom I met last year in in Spain on the coast we were sitting and teaching I was sitting and teaching a workshop at UM Costa Brava in Spain and somebody comes up and he he puts his phone in my face and it's my Instagram page and it was kid even though hola amigo anyway upcoming workshop in Seville right yeah we hope we hope May first to the fifth and we've got a beautiful workshop planned with lots of gorgeous sketching locations that love you you pronounce that we better imagine that Giraldo see this so I get in trouble if I don't say it like I know some Spanish it's gorgeous and now Game of Thrones was filmed and right have some scenes from Game of Thrones in Sevilla yeah so we're hoping that the core virus and is going to let us go there we'll see hopefully we get a vaccine your numbers get down go there anyone gets on yeah so thanks so much Stephanie for chatting with me today I really appreciate it and I know that everyone on this call I'm getting messages from people saying thank you thank you thank you so much this is a fabulous interview and somebody said I made two pages of notes and I have to tell you the truth aren't they making some notes too I always learn a lot from these interviews so thank you so much Stephanie oh my gosh that's great I'm look going through looking I see my friend being hull here in Seattle I love you be in and a lot of names I don't know so it's nice to meet you all there's BIC see this is so exciting oh my gosh thank you everybody so our people this interview has been recorded and hopefully if the recording is good it'll be posted on stage 56 YouTube channel please like and share and subscribe and as I said in my little commercial yesterday if you just found out about this interview at the last moment please subscribe to the 50 states newsletter because we announce it like a month ago and we want to make sure that nobody misses out on this great opportunity to have time chatting with Stephanie and seeing her gorgeous art as statistics also has online workshops with top artists like aunt Melanie and Oliver holder and Paul Houston and me so please don't have a look at the studio 56 websites or online workshops thank you so much Stephanie and thank you everybody for tuning in definitely do you have any last words you'd like to share with people oh just thank you all so much you know it's um it's I think we have to just support each other as much as possible through all of us this is so so difficult on so many levels then you know I'm far more fortunate than many so but yeah it's it's really difficult I have to say that the sketching community is has been fantastic I mean I I live for those those chats the Usk chats just a chance to see everybody around the world and connect so I hope everybody can hang Titan until we can travel and meet again yep right well thanks everyone for tuning in and I hope to see you next time thank you so much Stephanie Thank You Brenda I appreciate it all right everybody [Music] you