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]

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.

This post finds me simultaneously elated and frustrated.

I’m elated because, like many other fans of William Stout’s paleontological illustrations, I’ve been waiting several decades for a suitable follow-up to his terrific 1981 book The Dinosaurs. (There was an expanded update, The New Dinosaurs in 2000, that was welcome, but not the same as a new book.)

A beautiful book of Stout’s Prehistoric Life Murals for the San Diego Museum of Natural History was released last year; but as much as I enjoyed that book, it still wasn’t the follow up to The New Dinosaurs, that I and many others have been hoping for.

The reason for that is that the murals, as striking as they are, are direct paintings, but the illustrations for The New Dinosaurs were in a style that is unusual for paleo art, but at which Stout particularly excels.

Most dinosaur art is either fully painted, or monochromatic pen and ink (there are exceptions, of course, like Douglas Henderson’s wonderful charcoal drawings); but the majority of Stout’s images for The New Dinosaurs were pen and ink with watercolor. This approach has all of the visual charm of Stout’s refined pen and ink work, combined with a beautiful application of color.

Pen and ink with watercolor is an approach that I enjoy in general, but particularly in the case of Stout’s application of it to images of dinosaurs, in which the textures of the animals and their environments are ideal subjects for the style.

(I like this approach so much that I used it, or a digital variation of it, for my own dinosaur illustrations for my dinosaur themed iPhone app; but I’m nowhere near Stout’s degree of mastery.)

The good news is that Flesk Publications, a small publisher that specializes in superbly produced books on art, illustration and comics (and which printed the aforementioned book of Stout’s paleo murals) has released not one but two absolutely beautiful new books of William Stout dinosaur art, Dinosaur Discoveries and New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z.

The first is the true long-awaited successor to The New Dinosaurs, surpassing it in many ways. Beautifully produced in the tradition Flesk has established, Stout’s prehistoric pen and ink and watercolor marvels just jump off the page. It showcases 61 new dinosaurs that have been discovered in the last 20 years.

The hardback is a limited edition of 500 copies, numbered and signed by the artist with a bound-in plate not published in the subsequent paperback edition.

The second book is a smaller edition in which some of the material from the larger volume has been elegantly arranged into an A-Z children’s dinosaur book. While it shares content with the larger volume, Stout fans will want both, as they present the material differently enough to not seem redundant (plus they’re just so wonderfully designed and printed).

You can read publisher John Fleskes’ account of The Process behind the New Stout Books on his blog.

Though Amazon lists the books as not yet released, all three (New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z and the hardbound and softbound editions of Dinosaur Discoveries) are available now from the Flesk Publications web site, as well as William Stout’s site.

OK, so why the part about being frustrated when Dinosaur Discoveries is, indeed, the Stout paleo art book I’ve been waiting for all these years?

Well, my frustration centers on my limited ability to point you to images from the books. Neither Flesk or Stout have seen fit to show a gallery of work from the books on the web, though there are a few scattered images you can look at.

I know that both artists and publishers have concerns about images (particularly terrific dinosaur images) being “borrowed” and spread around the web; but if you want to sell these books, you should let people know how great they look (with some detail images, come on)!

Anyway, below is what I can find on the Flesk site; but the best, and largest, images I can point you to (short of the books themselves, of course) are to be found in a download the Flesk Catalog from the right hand column of the Flesk site’s home page (from which I extracted the detail image above, bottom).

In the meanwhile, I’m happily camping out in the comfy chair with a cup of tea and my copy of Dinosaur Discoveries.

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)

Butch Belair is a photographer and digital artist based in Brooklyn, NY.

He indicates that he drew extensively as a child, but lost interest in drawing for a time and only returned to the practice a few years ago. He began to carry a pen and sketchbook and draw his surroundings, and has since added watercolor to his sketching materials.

Belair says he considers drawing his form of meditation, an escape from the stresses of working, and devotes time to it whenever he can.

His watercolor sketches of city scenes, particularly those of row homes or industrial and commercial structures, are wonderful in their contrasts of texture light and shadow.

He takes on complex scenes as a challenge, working immediately in ink and watercolor, without preliminary pencil sketches, on subjects like metal bridgework and elevated train structures.

He now frequently works in 5×8 watercolor sketchbooks and has posted a Flicker stream of his sketches.

Belair also contributes to Urban Sketchers, which is where I encountered his work.

Joseph Zbukvic is a Croation born artist living and working in Melbourne, Australia.

Zbukvic’s atmospheric, emotionally resonant watercolors have a wonderful characteristic of being simultaneously loose and crisp — loose in that he suggests rather than elaborating, and crisp because of his masterful command of edges. He has a highly refined sense of when to define a sharp edge, and when to let an edge disappear into mists of hazy textured color.

His landscapes and cityscapes, often of locations in Europe, are highly evocative of the place, without being rigid in their portrayal of details and specifics. He portrays the kind of visual image we might call up as a memory of a fondly remembered place, both hazy and sharp.

Many of Zbukvic’s paintings are done on location. His palette is often muted and understated, though sometimes punctuated with higher chroma passages. Zbukvick enjoys dwelling on misty atmosphere, rain and overcast shadow, as well as the haze of bright sunlight.

Zbukvick gives highly regarded workshops. This year’s schedule includes dates in France, Spain and Canada as well as Australia. His DVD, Watercolor Impressions, includes scenes from previous workshops; you can see a short excerpt by clicking on the second image on the workshop page.

I also came across this video clip from Inside Joseph Zbukvic’s Sketchbook, related I think to a June, 2008 cover story on him in Watercolor Artist magazine.

In addition to his workshops, Zbukvick also teaches at Charles Sturt University and the Mitchell School of Arts.

Some of the galleries that represent his work have additional galleries in which you will find images not on his site (and/or larger reproductions, particularly the first two listed).

[Suggestion courtesy of Jeroen Coert]

Addendum: Adebanji Alade wrote to let us know about Zbukvic’s book Mastering Atmosphere & Mood in Watercolor: The Critical Ingredients That Turn Paintings into Art. Unfortunately, it is out of print and resellers seem to be asking high prices for it at the moment. Perhaps something to keep an eye out for.

Mattias Adolfsson is a 3D artist living outside of Stockholm, Sweeden and currently working for gaming developer Simbin Development Studios.

Having apparently put aside traditional drawing for a while, Adolfsson returned to regular drawing when he started his sketchblog Mattias Inks, in 2006. Since then he has populated it with a wonderful and fast growing assortment of whimsical drawings on a variety of subjects and themes.

Usually drawing with a Namiki Falcon fountain pen and Noodler’s American Eel ink, and often in the pages of Moleskine sketchbooks, Adolfsson draws charmingly offbeat characters, animals, robots and architectural fantasies, as well as more straightforward sketches of his surroundings.

He often fills out his drawings with watercolor to varying degrees, usually with light touches that leave the feeling of the ink drawing intact.

For someone who has only been drawing recently for a couple of years, Adolfsson has been prolific; his Flickr galleries go on for dozens of pages.

He also has a web site with galleries of his drawings, doodles and sketch books; as well as an Etsy shop in which he sells original art.

One of his excursions into fanciful imaginings is his interpretation of “Star Wars, the baroque version” (expanded page version here), with a curly-wig helmeted Darth Vader, blunderbuss and balloon-pak equipped Bobba Fett, and Han Solo being harassed by the puritan police at the base of his eminently baroque Millennium Falcon (top, left).

I particularly enjoy Adolfsson’s architectural imaginings, like his houseflowers (top, right) and ornate, leaning, single-room-stacked “skyscraper prototypes” (left).

Mattias Adolfsson is giving a workshop in drawing this July 29-31 (more information here, in Swedish); and is currently working on a children’s book titled Till mitt barnbarn.

[Via 'skine art]

I came across the work of Mark Taro Holmes when I was struck by these two watercolor sketches on the Urban Sketchers blog. They were from his participation in the recent Sketchcrawl in San Francisco (see my posts on a previous Sketchcrawl, and here).

I then looked him up and found his sketch blog, SKETCHtaro, which has a wonderful array of his sketches, largely in watercolor or pen and ink, of both landscapes and figures.

His figure drawings have an engaging looseness, within the framework of accomplished draftsmanship. He has an unusual approach, sometimes drawing the figure in line, but multi-colored watercolor line, applied in brushstrokes that vary in weight and translucency as well as color .

His black ink drawings are frequently concerned with shadow and the play of light across architectural details.

Holmes is professionally a gaming concept artist and art director. According to his short bio on ConceptArt.org, he is currently the Studio Art Director at Ensemble Studios, and and has worked on gaming titles like Neverwinter Nights and The Lord of the Rings Online. MobyGames lists some of his other credits here. [Correction: Holmes has moved on from Ensemble and is now doing concept art for the film industry. See this post's comments.]

Urban Sketchers is a group blog that I first wrote about last November.

Since then, hundreds of additional sketches have been added; and the blog’s layout has been updated, with a wider format and better organizatation (though I still wish they would somehow limit the Flickr slideshow widget at page bottom to a single page and make the “Older Posts” link bigger).

Urban Sketchers has kept the tagline of “See the world one drawing at a time”, and continues to a be a source of constant delight, filled with location sketches in a variety of media, size, approach and degree of finish.

There is an increasing list of contributors, as well as an impressively extended list of represented cities and countries from around the world; though much of the content is still provided by a core of frequent contributors, including founder Gabi Campanario. (Sadly, Gabi’s recent sketches have been chronicling the impending demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a terrific newspaper; image above, top right)

Many of the images are linked to larger versions, and most of the contributors have their own blogs and web sites to which you can go for even more sketches and finished work. Some of them are profiled on the Meet the Correspondents page, but others are worth tracking down through links at the bottom of their posts, or looking up via Google.

Updates are frequent and you can check in with Urban Sketchers any day and find fresh new sketches to enjoy and take inspiration from. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to check in frequently enough to keep up with the new posts.

(Images above, left to right: Pete Scully, Gabi Campanario, Tommy Kane, Tis Boon Sim, Roger O’Reilly, Gerard Michel, Stephen Gardner, Maarten Ruijters)