Last September, I launched my Travel Sketching course, in which I shared my top strategies for sketching while on the go: my 7 lines, 5 shapes, and 3 layer techniques. It was a short, fun course, and these techniques can be used by anyone regardless of their level of experience. 

My niece and nephews (ages 6-10) did a great job with the exercises. They said that doing these was ‘fun and cool!’

It’s been great to hear from people who took the course last year that these techniques worked for them on recent trips. But I know that beginners are often frustrated because they know their sketches don’t look right and don’t know how to fix them.

Here are two typical beginner sketches of this photo of the Acropolis, which we sketched in Part 3: Layer inside the Travel Sketching course. (Thanks Julie  for letting me use your great photo!)

The solution to making your sketches more believable is to focus on the important edges and the relationships between them. To do that, I look for volumes and edges. Yes! ESV is the answer yet again!

If you have missed my recent articles, Feeling Edges, Abstracting Shapes and Constructing Volumes (ESV) are the core concepts in my Foundations course.

Here is a markup of how I saw the scene in terms of Edges, Shapes and Volumes.

The main three elements in this sketch are:

• the angles of the two sides of the temple
• the foreshortening on the two sides
• the horizontal band of the people.

So here is a markup showing how these edges relate back to the two beginner sketches.

So in summary: My Travel Sketching course contains ideas for you to start sketching, but if you really want your sketches to look more like the scenes in front of you my 12 week Foundations course is the way to achieve that! We have just started a Live Version of Foundations and it’s not too late to join – find out more here.