Kiah Kiean is an architect, designer and artist. He has a loose, gestural sketching style with which he renders scenes of his native Penang, Malaysia, as well as townscapes and cityscapes from his travels.

Kiean works in ink, wash, graphite and watercolor. He posts images of his sketches on his artblog and Flicker stream and on the Urban Sketchers website, which is where I encountered his work.

Occasionally he posts photos of his sketchbooks, which show that he often works at a size a bit larger than many artists who do location sketches. At times he works on large drawing paper and at other times on large Moleskine sketchbooks open two pages wide.

Since much of his work is in a large or distinctly horizontal format, the small images above don’t show it to best advantage, as the detail crops at top, second and fifth down, demonstrate.

I’ve written previously about a number of illustrators who are represented by Richard Solomon, a well known artists representative in New York whose list of represented artists reads like a who’s who of the top names in contemporary illustration.

In addition to the portfolios of represented artists on the Richard Solomon website (for which I’ll issue a Time-sink Warning), Solomon has in recent months been posting sketches from a number of the artists on a Tumblelog called Warm Up Sketches + Working Process.

These run the gamut from personal sketches and sketchbook pages to preliminary roughs for illustrations to relatively finished drawings. Though a few of the links from the index page are broken at the moment, there is more than enough wonderful material here to make a visit well worthwhile.

Many of the drawings and sketches are linked to the artist’s page on the Solomon website, or you can go in through the front of the site and look them up.

(Images above: Murray Kimber, James Bennett, David Johnson, Jon Foster, Gregory Manchess, Scott Brundage, Tyler Jacobson, Tim Bower, Thomas Ehretsmann, Hermann Mejia, Mark Summers)

Swedish artist, designer and teacher Nina Johansson subtitles her website “Because drawing is good for you”, and its pages are filled with the ripe, healthy fruit of that philosophy, lots of wonderful drawings, sketches and watercolors.

Johansson seems to take as her favorite subject that most perfect of all drawing subjects — what’s in front of her at any given moment, be it food, a street, cars, plants, buildings, train passengers, a camera, pens, hands, pedestrians or travel scenes.

Her efficient, casual notation, textural ink lines, pencil shadings and brilliant dashes of watercolor enliven her take on even the most mundane of subjects.

She also has a portfolio of more finished work and several galleries of sketchbooks. The home page of her site is arranged as a blog.

You can also find her work posted on Urban Sketchers.

[Via Escape Into Life]

Wil Freeborn is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Glasgow, Scotland.

Though his professional portfolio focuses on his (quite nice) graphic design rather than illustration, his blog features a number of wonderful sketches.

These are of a variety of subjects — cafe and store interiors, schoolrooms, townscapes, landscapes and a particularly nice series of people working on a steam locomotive (also here). There are also life drawings and pantings and a few other projects mixed in.

Most of his sketches appear to be in pencil and watercolor in the pages of Moleskine sketchbooks. They combine the informal, loose qualities of travel sketches with clear observation and occasionally more elaborate rendering in watercolor.

One of the things that art does best it to make the ordinary extraordinary. By focusing attention on commonplace objects artists can reveal them in ways that make us see them anew.

I was amused and delighted by Pete Scully’s series of 50 drawings of fire hydrants, standpipes, water tanks, meters and even a water tower, in which he finds great variety of form, color and texture.

The drawings, which he has also put together as a single, poster-like image (above, top, larger image here) were done as Scully’s participation in the Flickr pool NaNoDrawMo challenge. (Inspired by National Novel Writing Month, or NoNoWriMo, NaNoDrawMo was a challenge to produce 50 individual drawings during the Month of November.)

Scully posted the individual drawings on his blog over the past month. You’ll also find other series of drawings accessible from the menus at the top of the pages, with drawings from places like San Francisco and London.

Scully is originally from the U.K. and now lives in California. He is a contributor the Urban Sketchers Blog. (See my previous post about Urban Sketchers, and note that they have changed the address of the blog from .com to .org).

Rob Carey is an American school teacher living in Kandern, Germany. He frequently sketches the area around where he lives as well as chronicling his travels to other locations around Germany and trips back to the U.S.

Carey is a contributor to the Urban Sketchers community blog (see my posts about Urban Sketchers, and here). He works in pencil, fine point marker and watercolor.

His sketches vary between a loose, informal feeling and more controlled architectural renderings. They often evidence a fascination with light and shadow amid the arrangements of architectural forms.

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]