Is Sketching from Photos Still Urban Sketching?

Somebody asks us this most months, and they almost always ask it apologetically.

They have been sketching from their own photographs. Perhaps their knees will not let them sit on a kerb for two hours any more. Perhaps the thing they want to draw is four hundred miles away, or it rained all week, or they have twenty minutes between school pick-up and dinner and no way of spending it on a street corner. The sketches are good. They are pleased with them. And somewhere at the back of it all sits a small worry that they are not really doing the thing properly.

What urban sketching actually is

Ask Ian what urban sketching is about and he does not start with where you are standing. He starts with what you are doing with your eyes.

"It is about the things that you notice, the things that you see," he says, part-way through a workshop. "You start off with a very simple structure, a front elevation, and then you start looking deeper and deeper and deeper into that subject, and you start noticing things."

That is the whole discipline in one sentence. Not the pen, not the paint, not the postcode. Noticing.

A photograph does not stop you looking. It changes what there is to look at, which is a different problem and a solvable one.

What a photograph does to a scene

Ian is completely straight about this, and he says it while standing on the harbour wall at Conwy, filming the first workshop of Sketch Wales with a brush in his hand.

A photograph has already made your decisions. It has chosen the edges of the picture. It has fixed the light at one moment and killed it there. It has flattened the pavement so it runs dead straight across the bottom of the frame, which pavements never do when you are standing on one. It has evened out the near things and the far things so they all shout at the same volume.

None of that is a reason to stop. It is a list of the things you now have to do yourself.

What Ian Actually Does

At the end of the St Alban's Church workshop in the High Street Sketch Course, he is standing outside the church itself in Tattenhall, holding up the finished sketch.

"I'm so glad I didn't do it on location because it is freezing cold today. And there's just no way I could have drawn this. And this is why sometimes it's good to work from photographs."

Then there is Porto, which he has been drawing for seven years.

The first time was 2018, over as one of the international instructors for the symposium. He got there a couple of days early to do some warm-up sketches, and went looking for a square his friend Steve had photographed on holiday. He found it. "So I just sat there by myself for about two hours and just had two hours of absolute pure urban sketching enjoyment."

Two years later, during COVID, he drew the same square again for the virtual world tour. This time from a photograph.

Then he goes further. "And in some ways, this is probably composed slightly better. So the relationship between the buildings is perhaps a bit more harmonized, you know, the scaling of everything and the use of white space around the outside."

Same square, same sketcher. The version made from a photograph is the better composition, and he is the one who says so.

What one photograph costs you

There is one fair criticism and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Standing in a place, you see things a camera never pointed at. Half way through drawing a JCB in the Junkyard Course, Ian stops on a little weed growing up through the concrete by the tyre.

He is right, and that is the strongest version of the case against us. But look closely at what the problem actually is. It is not the photograph. It is the single photograph.

So take more. Take the view you mean to draw, then turn ninety degrees and take that too. Photograph the ground. Photograph the doorway you like three shops down. Take one from a step to the left and one from a step to the right, so that later you can work out which way a kerb actually wraps. Photograph the weed.

Come home with forty pictures of one street corner and you have not brought back a frame. You have brought back a place.

You are allowed to move things

This is the part most people never give themselves permission to do, and it is standard practice on every retreat we run.

On the Brighton trip, the deckchairs made the scene. Instead of standing about hoping somebody would sit in exactly the right spot, Ian and Rebecca bought three or four deckchairs of their own and put them precisely where they wanted them. They staged the beach.

It is called editing the scene, and it is not a workaround. It is composition. Shift the bin. Leave out the parked car. Borrow a doorway from another photo. Bring in a figure from the frame next door. Ian does it constantly, and his reason is always the same one: he is after a richer, deeper story than the one the camera happened to catch.

Why we teach it this way

It matters to us, this question, because of who we teach.

Not everybody can get out. Knees and hips. A wheelchair and a street with no dropped kerb. Caring for somebody who cannot be left on their own for three hours. Shift work, money, weather.

Nerves, too, because sitting down to draw in front of strangers is a hard thing to do the first time.

And when lockdown came and nobody could get out at all, a great many people found out for themselves that a photograph and a kitchen table were enough to keep them drawing. Plenty of them never stopped.

If urban sketching only counts when you are perched on a wall in the rain, then it is a hobby for the able and the free, and we have never been interested in running that.

John spent his working life as a photographer long before he was a sketcher. He was matter-of-fact about it on one of our live sessions, then wrote to make sure we had the rest of it too.

A career spent looking at what a lens does to a scene, and he still draws from them. Nobody here is arguing about en plein air either. And the rest of it is exactly what this piece is about: take more than one photograph, and go in close.

We do encourage getting out. An hour on a kerb retunes your eye for every photograph you look at afterwards, and if you can do it, do it. We have written elsewhere about what is special about sketching on location, and every word of it is true. Some things really cannot be replicated from a photograph, the feel of being in a place most of all.

But the next best thing is still a very good thing. And it does not make anybody's sketchbook worth less.

Final Thoughts

The difference between working on location and working from a photograph is real. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not done both. Location is generous and it hands you things for free. A photograph is bossy and it makes you work for them.

What is not real is the hierarchy. The noticing is the same. The deciding is the same. The looking deeper and deeper into a subject until it starts giving things up is exactly the same, and it is the entire discipline.

If you are at a kitchen table with a photograph on a tablet and a pen in your hand, looking harder at an ordinary building than anybody has looked at it in years, you are urban sketching. Carry on

Ready to learn more?

Learn the art of urban sketching with Ian Fennelly in our Beginner’s course as he guides you through 47 easy-to-follow lessons, with practical exercises, that transform you from complete beginner to skilled urban sketcher!

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