City Portrait in One Go: The Continuous Line

You now have tools, line, textures, values and washes in your kit. In this final lesson we bring it all together – not as a big, slow masterpiece, but in the fastest form there is: a city portrait in one go. The pen touches down and stays down until the picture is there. That sounds like a gimmick, but it's the most honest seeing exercise I know.

The pen stays on the paper

Find a motif with clear edges: a row of houses, an intersection, a café front with chairs in front of it. Set the fineliner or fountain pen down somewhere, on a roof edge for instance, and from then on only one rule applies – the nib does not leave the paper again. Your eye travels slowly across the motif, along the roofline, down the corner of the building, over the windowsill, and your hand follows that journey.

As soon as you've been somewhere and need to go back, you retrace an existing edge or take a direct connecting line straight across the picture. Those paths stay visible, and that's a good thing: they tell the story of how your eye worked. What matters is the pace. The eye leads by a short stretch, the hand comes after. Draw faster than you look and you produce decoration; look and then draw and you produce observation.

Distortion is the point

The result will be skewed. Rows of windows slip, a tower gets too long, a façade tips backwards. That's exactly what we're after. Because you can't lift the pen, measure and correct, there's no time for doubt – and with the doubt, the stiffness disappears too. Pages like this have an energy that a neatly constructed picture rarely achieves.

The distortion also shows you where your head joined in. Doors often come out too small, because we know them as symbols. Roofs get too flat, because we think of roofs as flat. Read that later like a log, but don't repair anything. A line straightened after the fact destroys the credibility of the whole page.

Blind drawing: eyes on the motif, not on the paper

The tougher variant goes like this: put the pen down, then direct your gaze entirely at the motif and don't look at the paper again until you're finished. So you don't lose your bearings completely, place the thumb of your other hand on one edge of the page as an anchor point. Two minutes is enough.

What comes out of it is often useless as a picture – but as training it's gold. You suddenly notice how many small changes of direction a roof edge has, and how much two façades differ in angle. Use blind drawing as a warm-up, two minutes before the actual session, and don't throw the page away. It belongs in the book.

The mature version: contour, three accents, one dab

Now the version you can genuinely show. Step one: the fast contour in one go, two to three minutes, with fineliner or fountain pen. Step two: you lean back, look at your page and place exactly three dark accents with the brush pen. Under a roof edge, in a doorway, under a parked car – wherever the shadow actually sits in the motif. Three dark spots immediately organise a tangled web of lines and give it depth. Five or six flatten the page again, because nothing dominates any more.

Step three is optional: a single dab of colour, in watercolour or coloured pencil, in one place. A red awning, a yellow window, a blue jacket. Just one. The contrast between the raw, shaky line and one precisely placed patch of colour makes the page look intentional rather than accidental.

Building series

Single pictures make you nervous, series set you free. Take the same street in the morning and in the evening, same viewpoint, same format, five minutes each. The light shifts, so the three accents land in completely different places – and for the first time you see it in black and white: light isn't something added on, it changes the motif. Or start a café series: ten cafés, always from the table, always five minutes, always one line. After five pages the individual one doesn't count for so much any more, and that's exactly when your hand loosens up.

Designing the page

Plan for two sketches per page, side by side or one above the other, with one to two centimetres of air to the edge. Above or below them a short title in your own handwriting, the date, and a note of a few words: "18:40, rain starting, tram pulling out" or "Coffee CHF 4.50, sun on the façade opposite". The writing isn't a label, it's part of the composition and fills empty areas with calm. A year later these notes are often more valuable than the drawing itself.

Exercise

Find a spot with a view of buildings – window, bench or café – and set the timer to five minutes. Draw a city portrait in one continuous line, without lifting the pen, without correcting. Then turn slightly or walk twenty paces on and do the same thing twice more, three pages in fifteen minutes altogether. Then pick the liveliest one and give it five minutes of finishing: three dark accents with the brush pen, optionally a single dab of colour. Finally a title, the date and a note of no more than eight words. Photograph the finished page and show it in the Coach.

Key points

A line that never breaks leaves you no time for doubt – and doubt is the sketch's greatest enemy. Three dark accents organise a page, six destroy it. Series instead of single pictures: once you have ten of them, you forgive yourself every single one.