The Sketch Loose Method for Sketching Outside

This course gives you the skills and confidence to sketch outdoors, whether that means a busy city square, your local café, or your own garden. Through three workshops, you’ll learn the essentials of setting up, creative approaches for working quickly or minimally, and strategies for tackling complex urban scenes.

Filmed on location in the Cotswolds, London, Cambridge, St Neots, Sweden, and more, each lesson includes clear demonstrations, practical challenges, and downloadable handouts that distill the key ideas so you can carry them with you wherever you sketch.

Step outside with your sketchbook and discover the joy of drawing from life. This first workshop sets you up for success, both practically and mentally, so you can sketch with confidence in any outdoor space.

Whether you're in a park, on a bench, or just outside your front door, you'll learn:

• What to pack (and what to leave behind)
  A look at simple, lightweight setups that make outdoor sketching easy and enjoyable, no need to carry everything you own.

• Simple and effective techniques for viewfinding, measuring, and perspective
  Learn how to find a good view, simplify what you see, and sketch with structure using tools like your pen, your phone, and your eyes.

• Fun thumbnail challenges to warm up and develop your skills
  Discover the power of drawing small, quick studies that help you test ideas, build confidence, and loosen up before tackling a full sketch.

• Three outdoor sketching challenges to embed your skills
  Each challenge builds on the last, guiding you through real scenes using my five-step sketching process: loose shapes, bold lines, light colour, bold colour, and finishing touches.

Along the way, you’ll learn how to keep things simple, how to edit busy scenes, how to deal with the public, and how to enjoy the unpredictable beauty of sketching outdoors.

Step away from the noise and into quiet, open spaces. In this workshop, we head into nature and small village settings to slow down, notice more, and experiment with different creative approaches to outdoor sketching.

The focus on this workshop is developing creative and flexible ideas such as:

• Minimal setup painting
  You don’t need a full studio to sketch outside. A minimal setup frees you up to move easily, respond to the moment, and focus on the essentials of line and colour.

• Watercolour pencils
  Watercolour pencils give you the best of both worlds: the control of drawing and the freedom of paint. You’ll learn how to use them for quick colour notes, subtle washes, or bold splashes that bring energy to your sketches.

• Sketching from thumbnails and references
  Not every sketch needs to be live on location. But quick thumbnails can help you plan, simplify, and experiment with composition before committing to a full page. You’ll discover how to translate a small idea into a larger sketch, and how to use thumbnail references without losing the looseness and life of your work.

• Rural scenes
  Sketching outdoors doesn’t just mean busy cities. Fields, cottages, rivers, and open skies bring their own challenges and rewards. You’ll learn how to capture space and atmosphere, simplify natural forms, and build a sense of place without needing to overwork your page.

The final workshop takes us into the buzz of urban life—where nothing stands still, and nothing goes quite to plan. Here, we’ll explore how to embrace the unpredictability of city scenes and turn it into expressive, characterful sketches.

In this workshop we'll look at a key ideas, all focussed around increasing the complexity of our sketching.

• Making edits and eliminating the unwanted
  Sketching is never about drawing everything. It’s about choosing what matters. We’ll look at practical strategies for editing as you go. You’ll see that sketches are about choices, not about photographic accuracy.

• Filling a page with people
  People bring life and movement to your sketches, whether you’re in a square, a market, or a café. You’ll learn simple, repeatable ways of sketching figures that don’t rely on perfect anatomy, but still capture gesture, energy, and variety.

• Nothing goes to plan
  Outdoors, the weather changes, people move, and sometimes your chosen subject disappears altogether. Instead of being setbacks, these moments can make your sketching more playful and alive. I’ll show you how to adapt on the spot, change subjects, or even make the unpredictability part of the story of your page.

• Longer urban sketch sessions
  Sometimes you’ll want to settle in and give a scene the time it deserves. I’ll guide you through building a more developed sketch step by step, from light shapes and lines through to layered colours and confident finishing touches. These sessions are where you really see progress, combining everything you’ve learned into a sketch you’ll be proud of.