This was an exercise in filling a sketchbook with studies of the built environment. When considering medium, I gave careful consideration to what media I was going to use as it needs to be portable and convenient to use to capture a scene quickly.

This exercise excited me and also was the perfect reason to invest in a Domestika course by illustrator Zoë Barker who has an amazing portfolio of architecture, people and food. She uses colour pencils a lot as well as some watercolour. Her course is 'Sketchbook Illustration with coloured pencils' which could not have fitted the brief any better. There was a deal on too so it was a bargain at around £10.

I invested in a dozen Faber Castell Polychromos pencils and a softback A5 sketchbook and set to work creating a portrait of Margate. Working on one specific town was inspired by one of Zoë's inspirations mentioned in the course, a book called 'London, you're beautiful' by David Gentleman thats now been added to my birthday list :-)

One of the big tips I took from the course was to use a Warm Grey 1 pencil that allows you to create a faint outline of the scene without heavy lines. Once happy with the composition you can either choose to colour directly or add lines in a darker tone pencil. I did a mixture of the two for this exercise and even used fountain pen for a couple and used coloured pencils when I got home.

Example of under sketch using Warm Grey 1 colour pencil for the Marina Cafe drawing - see below for finished sketch

I started the sketchbook with swatches of the colour pencils I bought. With hindsight I would have chosen differently but faced with so many, I chose randomly. Something good came from it though as forced me a few times to play with colours I would never use.

Below is a gallery of drawings made over 20 days, some on location and some from photographs taken on location and drawn in studio.

This was a fascinating exercise and feel I got better at it as I went through the sketchbook and is something I will continue and could potentially be a direction for me to travel in my illustration.

I'd like to now add in drawings at different times of day and weather conditions as these are all pretty much flat light weather during the day with the two obvious examples done in the rain.

Timelapse examples