Your first month of urban sketching
Urban sketching rewards regularity over talent. One session a week gets you somewhere. Three sessions a week gets you there fast. Here's what those first four weeks actually look like.
By Colin B. · Published June 18, 2026
Most people who want to start urban sketching spend too long getting ready. They read reviews of sketchbooks. They watch videos about pens. They wait until they feel like they can draw before drawing. Don’t. The skill comes from the practice, not before it.
The first month is uncomfortable. Your drawings will look rough. You’ll feel self-conscious in public. You’ll make decisions mid-sketch that you immediately regret. This is the exact experience every urban sketcher before you went through, and it passes faster than you think.
Week 1: The first drawing (just pick something and start)
The most important thing you do in week one is make a drawing. Not a good drawing. Any drawing.
Find somewhere with a fixed view: a cafe window, a park bench facing a building, a plaza with interesting architecture. Sit down. Open your sketchbook. Draw what’s in front of you for 15 minutes.
A few things to know before you start:
Start with the big shapes. Urban sketching beginners try to draw details before they’ve established the overall proportions. Draw the big rectangle of the building. Block in where the windows go. Get the rough perspective. Then add details. Reverse this order and you’ll spend 10 minutes on a door frame that’s in the wrong place on the building.
Wonky lines are fine. They are more than fine, they’re part of the aesthetic. Urban sketches are not measured drawings. A building that leans slightly, windows that aren’t perfectly uniform, a perspective line that’s a few degrees off: these are what make a field sketch feel like a field sketch. The people who buy prints of urban sketches buy them because of this quality, not in spite of it.
Don’t erase. Commit to your lines. If a line is wrong, draw over it with the right one. The layered, energetic quality of urban sketches comes from committed strokes, not from going back. Erasing slows you down and makes the drawing tentative.
Do at least two sessions this week. The second drawing will already feel different from the first. You’ll notice what you missed on the first attempt and approach the second one differently. That’s the whole game.
Week 2: Adding color (the ink-first workflow)
Once you’ve done a couple of drawings in ink, add watercolor on top. The standard urban sketching workflow is: ink lines first, then color washes. This is the workflow for a reason.
When you draw in ink first, you’re not afraid to paint over your lines (which you can, because Pigma Microns are waterproof once dry). You can be loose with the color because the structure is already there. You can also decide, halfway through painting, that the drawing works without color and stop.
A few watercolor principles that matter in the field:
Use less water than you think. Beginners flood the paper and then watch their colors run together into grey mud. Wet the brush, touch one corner to your palette, and make a stroke. If the paint looks too light, add more pigment, not more water.
Mix colors on the paper, not the palette. Painting a yellow wall? Put down yellow, then while it’s still wet, touch a bit of orange to the shadow areas. Let the colors bleed into each other on the paper. This is faster, more spontaneous, and looks better than mixing to a precise color on the palette first.
Leave white space. The paper itself is the lightest value you have. Don’t paint everything. Leave the brightest parts of the sky, the lit faces of buildings, and the highlights on windows as bare paper. This is the most common mistake beginners make with watercolor: filling in every area until the whole sketch looks flat.
Week 3: Finding what you like to draw
Not every subject works equally well for every sketcher. Spend week three exploring different subject types to find where your interest is highest.
Architecture is the classic urban sketching subject. Buildings stand still, they have strong geometric structure that’s forgiving to slightly-off perspective, and they reward patience. Most urban sketchers start here.
Street scenes include moving people, cars, market stalls, and the chaos of city life. These require quick observation. Sketch the ghost of a figure in ten seconds. Capture the overall composition. Accept that the people will have moved by the time you look up again. Many sketchers put people in with 3-5 quick strokes: a head oval, a torso line, two leg marks. Done.
Cafes and interiors are underrated as subjects. You’re seated, you’re comfortable, nobody thinks it’s strange to sit somewhere for an hour, and the indoor light changes slowly. Tables, chairs, the bar, other patrons: all good material.
Markets and shops have an abundance of interesting visual clutter. Produce stalls, storefronts, signage. The density of detail can be overwhelming but it also means you can focus on a small area and still have a complete sketch.
Draw whatever makes you want to keep drawing. The best subject is the one that keeps you on the bench for another ten minutes.
Week 4: Join a sketch walk
Urban Sketchers is a global nonprofit with chapters in nearly every major city and hundreds of minor ones. They organize public sketch walks: a group meets at a location, everyone sketches independently for an hour or two, then people share their drawings in a circle before leaving.
Go to one of these in your first month.
The sketch walk does a few things that are hard to replicate alone. You see how different people interpret the same subject, which is genuinely instructive. You get comfortable sketching in public with other people around. And the sharing circle after is one of the more reliably warm group experiences you’ll find in a hobby.
Your drawings will be the roughest in the circle. That’s expected. Everyone there was in your position. Share yours anyway.
Finding your local chapter: go to urbansketchers.org and use the chapter directory. Most chapters have an email list, a Meetup page, or a Facebook group. Some are very active (multiple walks per month); some are smaller and occasional. Join regardless of size.
What happens after month one
After a month of regular sketching, two things will have changed:
Your eye is better. Not your hand yet, but your eye. You’ll see buildings differently. You’ll notice how shadows fall, where the interesting geometric relationships are, what makes a composition work. This is the real payoff of early urban sketching, and it carries into everything visual you do.
You’ll know what you actually want. After 10-15 sessions, you’ll have opinions about your sketchbook (the paper might buckle too much; you want something bigger; you prefer hardbound). You’ll have opinions about your pens (maybe you want the fountain pen now). These opinions come from experience, not research, and they make your next gear purchase actually good.
A few things that accelerate improvement after month one:
Follow other urban sketchers. Instagram and the Urban Sketchers Flickr group both have excellent material. Don’t follow for inspiration to copy; follow to see how different approaches handle the same problems you’re facing.
Draw the same subject more than once. Return to a spot you’ve drawn before and draw it again. The comparison is instructive in a way that drawing new subjects never is.
Show up to the sketch walk even when you don’t feel like sketching. The sessions where you had to push yourself to go are often the ones that produce the most interesting drawings.
Ready to put together your kit? See our urban sketching gear guide for the specific sketchbooks, pens, and watercolors worth buying first.