Do buildings have a personality?
[Guest post by Richard Aitken in Melbourne, Australia] I trained as an architect, so sketching buildings is my main pre-occupation. My training was all straight lines, right angles, and accurate perspective. Yet so often, a sketch embodying these ideals can be a trifle lifeless—more photograph than creative act. So in the past few months I’ve […]
lost poblenou
[by lapin, barcelona, spain] I live in barcelona for 10 years now, after living the first months in the barceloneta district, I moved to poblenou to escape the crowd of tourists. I immediately felt at home in this old industrial area, a mix of factories, small modernist houses, graffiti, families on the rambla de poblenou […]
Silvertown, London: the lure of urban desolation
[By James Hobbs in London] London’s Urban Sketchers were recently invited to draw Silvertown, a major £3.5 billion regeneration project in east London’s docklands that will turn the derelict post-industrial wasteland into what aims to be the city’s “new creative capital” with 3,000 new homes and 21,000 new jobs. Named after its 19th-century founder Samuel […]
Street art brings birdsong to Auckland
By Murray Dewhurst in Auckland, New Zealand The streets around Karangahape Road, central Auckland, were taken over this weekend by the All Fresco street art festival. I spent a sunny hour and a half on Poynton Street (by the fire station) drawing Charles Williams, aka Phat 1, working on this piece on the facade of […]
The Other Side of the Tracks
For me, a teacher, the semester is over, and it’s time for me to start concentrating on my own work. It’s time to practice what I preach. Walking a short distance from my home, I stop and draw this melancholy scene by the train tracks. I’m drawn to decay as much as beauty, I […]