Pencil vs. Camera is project by Belgian painter, illustrator, caricaturist and photographer Ben Heine, in which he draws part of a scene, usually in a fanciful interpretation of it, and then takes a photograph of the drawing held up against the original scene or photograph.

The drawing is usually on a ragged-edged, odd shaped piece of paper, creating a more interesting intersection between the photograph and drawing. In some cases he plays rather fast and loose with his rendition of the scene, in others, his drawing is quite faithful.

Heine has posted the 13 drawings that are (so far) part of this project to a Flickr set, as well as posting them on his blog.

You can see most of the images to date on the page with his 13th image (mildly NSFW).

[Via Metafilter]

I think it’s unfortunate that so much of contemporary architectural illustration has been ceded to the faux photorealism of 3-D rendering. While I actually like well done CGI, when it comes to portraying architecture I very much prefer the beautiful crisp renderings of talented artists working in traditional media.

A case in point are the watercolor renderings of Australian artist John Haycraft. His sharp, clear representations of buildings and cityscapes carry a bright colorful flair that can’t be duplicated in 3-D, even by the same talented artist. On the Haycraft Duloy website there are galleries of both types of rendering.

In addition, there are some pen sketches and location watercolors of places like Venice and the Amalfi Coast. His envisioning of architectural subjects include aerial views of airports, large scale developments and even large areas of cities.

Haycraft studied with American watercolorist Charles Reid. There is a liveliness in his casual sketches that carries over into the more formal work.

A collection of his work was published in 2007, Where Was I? A collection from 60 years of drawing and painting.

[Suggestion courtesy of Paulo Mendonca]

Co-sponsored by the Urban Sketchers blog and Flickr group and the Pacific Northwest College of Art, the 1st International Urban Sketching Symposium is slated for July 29-31, 2010 in Portland, Oregon (USA). Registration is now open.

You can find all of the relevant information, including instructors, location information and accommodations on the symposium’s blog.

There is an interactive map of the area, pinned with locations that contributors have sketched, though I would like this even more if it was actually linked to the sketches, rather than just Google’s location photos.

In cooperation with Enrico Casarosa, founder of SketchCrawl, the last day of the symposium will coincide with the 28th World Wide SketchCrawl.

For those not able to consider attending, this is still a good excuse to pay another visit to the always changing landscape of the Urban Sketchers blog and Flickr group, and through them, follow links to the contributors’ blogs and web sites.

(Images above: Jason Das, Lapin, Gabi Campanario)

Florian Afflerbach is an architect and architectural artist, and one of the founders of the Urban Sketchers group blog, which I wrote about previously (also here and here).

While many artists who sketch architectural scenes rely on a suggestion or informal feeling for perspective, Afflerbach has a masterful command of its nuances, at times tackling drawings in three point or even curved perspective.

His sketches of buildings, streets and interiors have a wonderful feeling of place, as well as a tactile sense of weight, solidity and, in the case of larger structures, monumentality.

He often lays out perspective construction lines under his drawings, and they are precise in the sense of being accurate, but still retain an informality and sketch-like quality that gives them visual charm and immediate appeal. This immediacy also shows in his sketches of vintage cars from the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Afflerbach has a web site, but his portfolio must be downloaded as a PDF. As a founding member of Urban Sketchers, you can find a good number of his drawings posted there, along with a brief bio. The drawings are often linked to versions on his Flicker set, but they are unfortunately not much larger.

The Ficker set is extensive, though, and features a wide range of drawings and subjects from his native Stuttgart, Germany along with location sketches from his travels in Italy, France and elsewhere.

Stephen Harby is a working architect and lifelong student of architectural history with a passion for travel and sketching architecture.

Harby took a sabbatical from the architectural office in which he had been working for many years and devoted it to travel and sketching, and in the process moved to watercolor as his preferred medium for observing and drawing architecture.

His site has a section of recent work as well as collections of archived work, both arranged by places, such as France, Persia, Rome, Northern Africa, Spain, Tuscany and Venice.

He moves between color and monochromatic watercolor, using the latter like ink wash for tone drawings.

Unfortunately, some of the posted images are frustratingly small (those from Venice, for example); others, however, are large enough to get a feeling for the work and place (note the “large image” button under the main preview images). Some are sketchlike and briefly notated, others more developed (like those in the Southern California section).

Harby’s knowledge of and affection for the great architecture of the past shines in his depictions of great architectural triumphs like the Pantheon, which has its own section (image above, bottom right, in which he captures sunlight from the oculus against the interior walls).

In his statement about Sketching Architecture, Harby points out one of the best and often overlooked advantages to sketching on location over recording a place with photography:

“When one is obliged to remain in one spot for longer than the snap of a shutter, sketching or painting with patience and concentration, one gains a sense of total immersion, not only visually, but through the sounds, smells, and (most rewardingly) tastes that a prolonged stay in these favorite places makes part of the experience.”

[Via Artist Daily]

llustrator and painter Rob Rey is originally from Chicago, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

His illustrations have been recognized The Society of Illustrators Los Angeles, CMYK Magazine, Applied Arts and Arista.

His web site has a gallery of his illustration, which has a nice painterly feel with dramatically theatrical staging and use of lighting (images above, top).

What I found most appealing, though, were the “in-your-face” portraits in his “Painting” section, with their bold compositions, big textural brushstrokes and dramatic color. I also found many of those elements in his richly textured still life paintings engagingly lit cityscapes.

Rey also has a blog on which he posts additional paintings and nicely rendered cafe sketches.

Luc Desmarchelier is an art dierctor at Sony Pictures Entertainment as well as a concept and visual development artist who has also done work for DreamWorks Animation and Amblimation/Universal Studios.

Desmarchelier maintains two blogs, Ushusia, which showcases his professional work, and harmattan, which is devoted to his personal projects, paintings and sketches.

He doesn’t include much biographical information on either, but you can see his professional film credits on the IMDB.

His concept art pieces, in pencil, watercolor, gouache and acrylic as well as digitally painted, are evocative, atmospheric and wonderfully textural, with a marvelous sense of place, season and time of day. His professional blog also includes sketches and the final piece for his contribution to the Totoro Forest Project (image above, top right, see my post on the Totoro Forest Project.)

Thumbing back through his blog posts takes you not only through several films, but through numerous locations that feel like a kind of travel adventure.

In his personal blog, the travel and places are real, and beautifully expressed; particularly in his directly observed but poetically rendered Moleskine sketchbook watercolors (image above, bottom).

You will also find figure studies, and paintings in acrylic and oil, as well as digital sketches in Painter and Photoshop, of subjects and places both real and imagined.

Adebanji Alade was born in Nigeria, and trained at Yaba College of Technology (a renowned art college in Nigeria). He extended his studies at Heatherly’s School of Fine Art in Chelsea in the UK. He currently lives in the UK and works from a studio in Chelsea.

I first encountered Alade’s work through his blog, which he has subtitled: “My art, my passion for sketching”, and passion for art is something that he demonstrates in abundance.

His web site has galleries of his work in several categories, portraits, drawings, illustrations, landscapes, religious themes and African influenced work. It is on his blog, however, that I find the best showcase of the two aspects of his work I find most interesting, his landscapes, particularly cityscapes, and his “Tube” sketches.

Alade fills sketchbooks with drawings of fellow passengers on London’s public transportation; page after page of direct observation and impromptu portraiture, fascinating faces and glimpses into other lives, shared momentarily in the process of getting somewhere.

He sometimes takes his Tube sketches and develops them into paintings. He has a secondary blog, subtitled “The people I sketch everyday” in which he chronicles this process. There is also a gallery on his web site devoted to the sketches.

Alade works in a variety of media, oil, acrylic, watercolor, graphite, carbon pencil and pen and ink. For his landscapes, he works from sketches and photographs in the studio as well as being a dedicated plein air painter. Both his studio work and location painting evidence the same dedication to direct observation displayed in his Tube sketches.

He often posts preliminary sketches and the paintings developed from them on his blog, and occasionally posts photos of himself painting on location. I always find it interesting to see photographs of the location for a painting, as well as the artist’s setup, not only for the arrangement of easel, palette and painting tools, but for the sense of scale and feeling for the environment in which the artist was working.

In addition to his web site and blogs, there is a brief video of Alade at work and being interviewed on the Winsor & Newton site.

While I’m on the subjects of sketching and anniversaries (see my previous post about Urban Sketchers), this Saturday marks the 5th anniversary of the World Wide SketchCrawl.

SketchCrawl is a drawing marathon, originally conceived by Pixar storyboard artist Enrico Casarosa, and modeled as a pubcrawl, but with art materials. Artists gather in groups in various cities around the world and move from location to location within their respective cities, drawing what’s around them.

The results are often posted in blogs, Flickr groups and in the SketchCrawl forums.

This Saturday, November 21st, 2009, is the 25th World Wide SketchCrawl. You can look through the forum posts to see if anyone is organizing a SketchCrawl near you. Anyone can participate, at any level of sketching experience, including complete novice, and you can sketch with the group for a much or as little time that day as you choose.

Here are the guidelines for participation.

Prior to the event, the forum posts are about the locations and times of the events in various cities. After the event, look for the posts labeled “Results” to see comments about the event, photos and sketches from the day.

(Images above, from SketchCrawl 24, September, 2009: Gary Amaro, San Francisco, CA; “4ojos“, Ribafrecha, Spain; Guillaume Bonamy, Natsumi Tsuchida, Tokyo, Japan.)

Urban Sketchers, a terrific group sketchblog that I wrote about previously here and here, celebrated its first year anniversary this month.

Urban Sketchers is devoted to drawing on location in urban environments, and it has come a long way in the year since it was established by Gabi Campanario, an illustrator and journalist based in Seattle, Washington.

The blog now boasts a long list of invited corespondents from numerous cities and countries around the world, with a delightfully broad range of styles, mediums and approaches. Their first anniversary press release has the stats.

With its wide base of contributors, Urban Sketchers is updated often, making frequent visits rewarding. There is always something new and interesting.

You can browse by artist, listed in the left sidebar by name and home base location, or by subject tags on the right sidebar.

If you want to just flip through the entries in reverse chronological order, look for the small “Older Posts” link at the bottom of the center column.

Going forward, the group plans to formalize as a nonprofit organization, raise money for scholarships and grants, publish a book and organize international meetings; all in support of promoting location drawing, and enabling others to “See the world, one drawing at a time”.

(Images above: Matt Jones, Thomas Thorspecken, Benedetta Dossi, Gérard Michel, Stephen Gardner)