If you haven’t already heard…
 
I’m super excited to be  hosting a Version of  Foundations in the New Year.

The Live Version will start on Wednesday, 8 January, and will be a chance to work through my Foundations course with a group of sketchers from around the world.

Together we’ll work through the course and keep each other motivated and inspired!

Each week you will be prompted to move on to the next section of the course and there will be 12 bonus livestreams so that you can ask questions in real time and see reviews of selected work from the classroom. Click here for the lesson schedule and the livestream dates and times.

It’s been a few years since I last went through Foundations in this interactive way – so this is a big event!

Foundations, my most popular course, covers all the essential skills every sketcher should have. Designed for beginners, it teaches fundamental observational skills and urban sketching basics. It’s also perfect for self-taught sketchers seeking improvement or seasoned sketchers wanting to work faster.

In Foundations, you’ll learn to:

• Build a solid foundation with essential skills for sketching
• Develop effective techniques for sketching on location, regardless of subject matter
• Improve your ability to sketch faster and more spontaneously

Foundations sets the stage for all my other courses, containing the essential techniques I use in every sketch. I love revisiting the basics, and each time I go through Foundations, I develop new techniques!
 

Find out more about Foundations

Live Version starting 8 Jan 2025
Work through the lessons in 12 weeks
with an inspiring group of sketchers and
take part in 12 bonus weekly Q&A livestreams

As I’m gearing up to go through the course again I’ve put together a collection of images that describe the main concepts of the course. And I thought it would be fun to share them with you today.

Are any of these concepts things that you want to develop in your own work?

The core skill that we develop inside Foundations is learning to see the world in terms of edges, shapes and volumes (ESV). I have a specific way of thinking about these: Feeling Edges, Abstracting Shapes and Constructing Volumes.

I think about edges, shapes, or volumes (or all three) in every sketch I do, and whenever a sketch (or a part of a sketch) isn’t quite working, I go back to thinking about ESV.

In Foundations, we use edges, shapes, and volumes for simple objects (such as this letterbox) and more complex scenes.

Here are a few more ESV examples from the course. 🙂
(Yes, there is a Borromini demo in Foundations!)

Learning to simplify objects and scenes into big shapes is an essential skill for painting – such as sketching trees and capturing light. (Both of these are from Lesson 3: Abstracting Shapes)

We also look at accuracy – how to sight measure or use what I call minimal setup.

Here, you can see on the left a carefully measured sketch of a church door (it was hard to fit all the panels in without a little sight measuring), and on the right, you can see how I did a gestural setup of my sewing machine in yellow pencil before drawing in ink.

Many beginner sketchers are obsessed with learning perspective, and while it is good to understand perspective eventually, developing basic observational skills is more important. This image shows you how I drew these two sketches of a terrace house, thinking about shapes, angles, and foreshortened lengths – and I didn’t use perspective! 

In Foundations, we focus primarily on drawing skills, as I have a separate course dedicated to Watercolour. But you will pick up many tips for starting to use watercolour – how to apply colour in simple, lively washes.

We also look at how to combine ink and watercolour and how to decide what to draw in ink and what to describe in watercolour. There are many different ways to approach ink and wash – this image from the course shows four different variations.

In the last part of the course we focus on basic skills for sketching on location. We’ll explore strategies for limiting what we sketch (ie. we don’t have to draw everything!) and we’ll learn how to draw the main edges going in the right direction! 🙂

Note: Although the ultimate goal is to sketch on location, it’s totally okay to do the exercises from photos (especially if it’s winter for you!)

We also explore simple composition rules and how to create a focus for our sketch.

The last concept that I’ll share today is the idea of working out from a focus. This involves starting a sketch with the most important part of the scene (the focus) and then working spontaneously out from that point. Here is a screenshot of one of the bonus videos from Lesson 11.

Ah! Putting this article together is definitely increasing my excitement to go through Foundations again! 🙂 I love this course so much!

As you can see from this summary of concepts, Foundations is a comprehensive course designed to be an ongoing resource! You have lifetime access to all the lessons (and livestream replays) and free access to all future group events. Many Foundations participants have gone through the course numerous times.

If you have purchased Foundations at any time you can be part of this Live Version for free! To join  – simply go to the Foundations classroom via My Account/My Courses on the SketchingNow site and follow the instructions under the Welcome video. Or check out the email I sent to you a few days ago!

I would love you to be part of this cohort!

Finally…

1. Gift Certificates I have Gift Certificates available for my SketchingNow courses and bundles – starting at only $59 USD. Each one comes with a printable gift certificate. Find out more here.

2. Free Intro Lessons If you want to find out more about Foundations I have three free Intro Lessons  – sign up for them here.

 
If it’s a good fit for you I would love you to be part of this Live Version of Foundations. It’s going to be the perfect way to kickstart our sketching for 2025!

Are you joining the cohort? What aspect of your sketching do you want to work on the most in the new year? I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.

(If you are reading this via email, please click on the article title link below and add a comment on my blog. Thanks!)