Staying fast: crop, time, leaving things out

Coloured pencil has one property that slows you down outdoors: it tempts you to fill in. Because each stroke deposits only a little pigment, an area doesn't feel "finished" until you've made thirty or forty movements – and suddenly you've spent an hour on a façade while the light moves on and your fingers get cold. But urban sketching doesn't work through completeness, it works through suggestion. A sketch in which three spots are spot-on and the rest stays open feels more alive than one in which everything is worked through to the same degree. In this lesson you'll therefore build yourself a corset: small format, tight crop, fixed times.

Small, tight, one thing

The most effective remedy against filling in is a sheet that fills up quickly. Work on A6 or postcard format. On that area a single movement of the hand is enough to lay in a sky, and you won't even be tempted to draw every brick individually. On top of that, you're forced to be coarse: on A6 a window is a small rectangle, not a component with a frame, glazing bars and a curtain.

Then there's the crop. Beginners almost always take in too much – the whole square, both sides of the street, plus the church in the background. Instead, move closer, in your head or with your feet. A doorway with steps and a letterbox. A café table with a chair and the base of a parasol. A fountain with the patch of cobblestones in front of it. One motif, not a whole scene. If you can't decide: hold your hands together to make a frame and move it until only one thing is left inside that you genuinely find interesting.

The schedule: 3 – 10 – 8 – 4

Give yourself 25 minutes and divide them up beforehand. Set a timer, otherwise you'll slide back into filling in.

The first three minutes belong to the line – and with a dark coloured pencil rather than a graphite pencil. Indigo, dark blue or a deep brown work well: they're dark enough to give structure, but they don't dirty the colours on top the way graphite does, and you can later fold them into the shadows. Draw only the big edges – roofline, wall, ground, the main shape of your motif. No details.

The next ten minutes are for the large areas, all of them light. Wall, sky, street, tree canopy: one layer each with little pressure, in calm hatching, without thinking about subtleties. By the end of this phase there should be no white left where colour is supposed to go – but everything should still look pale.

Then eight minutes for shadows and mixtures. Now you lay down your second and third layers, but only where things need to get darker or more colourful: under the canopy, in the window reveal, in the shadow on the ground. Here you change colour instead of pressing harder – a glaze of violet or blue-green over the ochre of the wall makes the shadow far more convincing than more of the same tone.

The last four minutes are the accents with pressure. Five or six spots, no more: the dark gap in the door frame, the edge under the window lintel, a strong dab of colour on a sign or an awning. These spots carry the whole picture.

Only the focus gets finished

Decide before the first stroke which spot will be worked up. Usually that's an area of just a few centimetres: the entrance, the face of the building, the chair in the foreground. That's where you layer, that's where you press, that's where you put details. Everything else stays loose hatching – or bare paper outright. An untouched edge isn't a mistake, it's air. The eye reads a sketch like a stage: where it's sharp and dark is the leading role, the rest is scenery. If you invest the same amount everywhere, there's no leading role left, and the picture goes flat even though you worked longer.

Fineliner plus coloured pencil

If you need it even faster, combine the two: contour with a waterproof 0.3 fineliner, then coloured pencil in just a few areas. The ink line takes over all the structure, so you no longer have to model with the pencil, only colour. Three to four colours, applied lightly, done. This combination is ideal for moments when you have to stand or the motif is moving – market stall, building site, railway platform. Conversely: if you have time and a place to sit, stick with the indigo line, it looks softer and belongs to the picture in terms of colour.

Exercise

Take an afternoon and three postcards or three A6 pages. Find three different motifs within a few minutes' walk – a doorway, a vehicle or a kiosk, a corner with trees. You get 20 minutes per sketch: two minutes of line with a dark pencil, eight minutes of large areas applied lightly, six minutes of shadows and mixtures, four minutes of accents with pressure. Set the timer, and when it rings you stop, even mid-stroke. Afterwards upload all three sketches in the Coach and compare the feedback: usually the third one is the best, because by then you've stopped wanting everything.