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]

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.