The Urban Sketching Handbook : Understanding Perspective

The Urban Sketching Handbook: Understanding Perspective provides keys to help make the experience of drawing with the proper perspective fun and rewarding, using composition, depth, scale, contrast, line and creativity.

A good sketch starts with good bones.

Often challenging and overwhelming to sketchers, the fourth book in the Urban Sketching Handbook series uses drawings and simple steps to explain the concepts of perspective in practical and useful ways for on-site sketching. Most books are either too abstract or don't provide enough information that relates to what you actually do when you're out in the busy, wide world about to start a drawing. Where do you start? How do you edit what you see to flatten and shrink it onto your paper? How does perspective work?

The Urban Sketching Handbook: Understanding Perspective helps you learn to think like an architect, to draw buildings and spaces by reducing what you see to simple, basic shapes, then adding layers in simple steps, and finally finishing your sketch with detail, tone, and colour--in accurate perspective. Full of helpful tips, architect and illustrator, Stephanie Bower even de-constructs sketches to show you how to create them! Once you understand perspective, it will change the way you see the world--you'll see perspective everywhere.

Some of the key concepts explored in this volume are:

• Basic Terms
• Basic Spatial Principles
• Types of Perspective
• Building a Sketch in Layers
• Special Conditions

About the Author

Honored with the 2013 and 2012 KRob Architectural Delineation awards for Best Travel Sketch and the 2013 Gabriel Prize fellowship for 3 months in France, Stephanie Bower is a Seattle-based architectural illustrator, teacher, watercolorist, and traveling Urban Sketcher.

Stephanie worked as a licensed Architect in New York City before gravitating to professional architectural illustration and concept design. In Seattle, she produces pencil and watercolor images for many renowned architecture and design firms.

For over twenty-five years, Stephanie has taught the how-to's of architectural sketching--for a decade in New York City at Parsons, in Seattle at the University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts, and most recently, in popular sketching workshops called "Good Bones" where she teaches the concepts of basic perspective sketching and watercolor. She was an instructor at the 2014 Urban Sketchers Symposium in Paraty, Brazil and also teaches an annual workshop in Civita di Bagnoregio ITALY. People around the world follow her sketches online via Flickr, her blog "Drawing Perspectives", and as blog correspondent for Urban Sketchers. She is also a signature member of the Northwest Watercolor Society.

Stephanie continues to learn about architecture through her sketches, pursuing her lifelong dream of seeing the world, sketching, teaching and encouraging others to see their world through the magic of drawing.