There is a lot of residential development happening in Sydney at the moment, so last week I headed to Rhodes, an area that is now full of multi-storey apartment buildings. I wanted to challenge myself to sketch a type of building that I don’t like very much which requires a slow patience approach. I am rarely in the mood for that!

I was especially tired after the craziness surrounding the start of my SketchingNow Buildings course, so the first stop was a cafe. Left of Field is a new cafe that is getting rave reviews. Their signature dish is hotcakes with Earl Grey custard. I just had to try it, didn’t I? It was very nice but the quantity was too much for me. Next time I will go with a friend so we can share.

Then it was time to explore this ‘new’ part of Sydney. Wow!

There is even a brand new bridge across Homebush Bay. It’s only for buses and pedestrians.

A warmup sketch of the whole view…

And then a sketch of the tallest building, using a ‘constructing volumes’ approach which is what we will be looking at this week in Lesson 2.

A splashy cross-hatched sketch of one part of another building.

And then two attempts to draw a very clever design. Oh! sometimes modern buildings are just too hard to draw quickly when you are tired.

My final sketch was shaped based – people doing Buildings will see my first step of this.

It was a fun morning, but my computer was calling me. So time to head home and get back to video editing (Lesson 2 has a demo filmed on location in Venice!)

I am still developing a fast approach to sketching tall repetitive buildings, but this outing was definitely a step in the right direction.

So do you like sketching multi-storey modern buildings like these?

It’s not too late to join SketchingNow Buildings but I will be closing the doors on Wednesday 21 September and will not be offering this content again for at least six months.