Urban Sketching for Beginners: How to Start, What to Carry, and Why Your Paint Matters More Than You Think
By Dalton Scolman
Urban sketching is one of the most satisfying creative habits you can build. You carry a small kit, you sit somewhere interesting, and you draw what you see. The sketch does not have to be good. It does not have to look like the place. It is a record of the fact that you were there, that you looked carefully, and that you translated what you saw through your hands. That is genuinely worth doing, and it is more accessible than most people assume.
This guide covers everything a beginner needs to get started: how to approach a scene, what to put in your kit, and one supply decision that most urban sketching guides skip over entirely but that makes a significant difference to how comfortable and easy the whole practice feels.
What Urban Sketching Actually Is
Urban sketching is drawing and painting on location. Not from photos at home, not in a studio from memory. You are there, in front of the thing, sketching what you see in real time.
The subject does not have to be urban in the sense of city streets, though that is where the name comes from. Cafes, parks, harbors, train stations, market stalls, your own backyard. Anywhere you can sit with a sketchbook is fair game. The point is the on-location quality: the light changes, people move, a truck blocks your view for ten minutes and then moves on. You are making decisions in real time rather than from a fixed reference. That constraint is not a frustration, it is what makes urban sketching interesting.
The global community around urban sketching, organized through UrbanSketchers.org, has grown significantly over the past decade. Local chapters meet regularly in cities around the world to sketch together, share work, and welcome newcomers. If you want community alongside the practice, it is there.
The Right Mindset Before the Right Supplies
Most beginners focus on supplies first and mindset second. That is backwards.
Urban sketching rewards speed and looseness over precision. You are rarely going to sit in one spot for three hours working on a finished painting. You are going to have twenty minutes before your coffee gets cold, or thirty minutes before your travel companions want to move on. The sketch you finish in that window is more valuable than the ambitious one you never complete.
This means your first goal is not accuracy. It is presence. Get something on the page that captures the feeling of where you are and what caught your eye. Proportion can be approximate. Perspective can be imperfect. Color can be whatever you mix quickly. A sketch that exists is worth infinitely more than the perfect one that stays in your head because you were waiting until you felt ready.
One practical way into this: before you touch color, spend two or three minutes just looking. Pick the one thing about the scene that is most interesting to you. It might be an archway, a shadow, a cluster of chairs, a roofline. That thing is your anchor. Build the sketch around it and let everything else simplify or disappear.
The Kit: What You Actually Need
Urban sketching has a minimalism problem. Go on any sketching forum and you will find people with elaborate kits containing thirty colors, multiple brush rolls, and a folding stool. You do not need any of that to start.
Here is what a practical, genuinely minimal kit looks like:
A sketchbook with proper watercolor paper. If you want to add color with watercolor, the paper has to be able to handle water. Look for at least 140lb (300gsm). Below that weight, the paper will buckle and warp badly when wet, and wet paper that warps mid-sketch is genuinely frustrating to work on. A5 size (roughly 5.5 x 8 inches) is the most practical format for location work. Small enough to hold in one hand, large enough to actually work in.
A waterproof fineliner. Most urban sketches start with ink rather than pencil, because ink is faster and forces you to commit. A waterproof pen means you can go straight over your lines with watercolor without the ink smearing. Sizes 0.3 and 0.5 cover most needs. Some sketchers pencil lightly first, then ink over it, then erase. Either approach works; the waterproof part is not optional.
A water brush. This is the piece of kit that most beginners overlook and most experienced urban sketchers consider essential. A water brush has a reservoir in the handle that you fill with water. Squeeze gently and water flows to the tip. Press the tip on a paper towel or cloth to rinse between colors. No jar. No cup. No surface required to rest them on. For urban sketching specifically, a water brush is not a convenience upgrade. It is what makes the whole practice possible in environments where a jar of water would be impossible or absurd.
Paint. This is where the decision matters more than most guides acknowledge, and we will go into it properly in the next section.
A small cloth or a few folded paper towels. Your rinse. Weighs nothing.
That is the full kit. Everything fits in a jacket pocket or a small pouch. It weighs less than your phone.
Why Your Paint Format Matters for Urban Sketching
Most urban sketching guides recommend a small pan set and leave it there. Pan sets are perfectly usable and many excellent urban sketchers work with them. But there are things about the urban sketching context specifically that make the format of your paint worth thinking about more carefully.
When you are sketching on location, you are often:
Working quickly, with ten to thirty minutes before conditions change or you need to move. Sitting in awkward positions, on a low wall or a narrow step, with no flat surface to rest a palette on. Standing, which rules out anything that requires two hands to manage. In a public space where you do not want to draw attention with a spread of supplies. In a situation where one wrong move could tip your water jar and ruin the sketchbook you have been filling for three months.
Pan sets solve some of these problems. They are compact and self-contained. But they require opening a lid and keeping it open, which means you need a surface and a stable position. And over time, pans in a shared palette cross-contaminate each other, which subtly affects every mix you make.
Peerless DryColor sheets solve all of them. Each sheet is flat, dry, and slightly smaller than a business card. You tuck them into your sketchbook, your back pocket, or a small pouch. When you are ready to paint, you touch a wet brush to the sheet. The concentrated pigment activates instantly. You pull color directly from the sheet to your paper. No palette to open. No lid to manage. No spill risk. No setup.
Because the paint is dry and flat, you can work in any position: standing, sitting on a curb, balanced on a narrow ledge. You can hold the sketchbook in one hand and paint with the other. The whole process is as unobtrusive as writing in a notebook.
The Peerless Sidekick is the format built for exactly this. Eight colors in a flip-tab design, with a built-in mixing surface, small enough to tuck into a passport holder. Paired with a water brush, it is the most invisible, location-ready watercolor kit available. You can be painting within fifteen seconds of stopping somewhere.
For sketchers who want a wider palette to choose from, Individual DryColor Sheets let you hand-pick colors that suit the places you sketch most. A sketcher who mostly works in warm southern light needs a different selection than one who paints gray northern coastlines. You build the palette that matches where you paint.
How to Approach a Scene
This is the part most guides skip and the part beginners struggle with most.
You arrive somewhere interesting. There is a lot to look at. Your instinct is to try to draw all of it. Do not.
Start by deciding what you are not going to draw. A busy scene with buildings, people, vehicles, and sky is too much to tackle all at once, especially at the start. Pick one focal point and simplify everything around it to supporting context. A doorway with interesting detail. A market stall. A cluster of tables outside a cafe. Let the rest of the scene serve that focal point rather than compete with it.
Shapes before details. Whatever you are drawing, establish the big shapes first. The proportions of the main mass, where the horizon sits, roughly where the light is coming from. Then add detail only in areas that matter. Urban sketching is not illustration. You are not required to draw every brick or every person in the street. Suggesting is often more effective than completing.
Work light to dark. If you are adding watercolor, lay your lightest values first and build toward darker ones. This is standard watercolor practice, but it matters especially in urban sketching where time pressure can make you rush to the darks before the foundation is established. Your lightest wash sets the mood of the whole sketch. Get that right and everything else is easier.
Leave white space. Unpainted areas of paper read as light. Resist the instinct to fill every corner. The blank white of the paper is doing work, even when it looks like nothing.
Stop earlier than you want to. Urban sketches almost always look better slightly underworked than slightly overworked. The last ten percent of effort is often where things go wrong. When the sketch feels mostly done, put the pen down and look at it from a slight distance. If it reads, it is finished.
Working Fast: Practical Color Techniques for Urban Sketching
Urban color does not need to be complicated. Most experienced urban sketchers work with far fewer colors than beginners assume.
A useful starting palette for location work: a warm yellow, a warm red, a cool blue, and a neutral dark. From those four, you can mix almost any color you need for an architectural or street scene. Earth tones come from mixing warm red with blue. Greens come from yellow and blue. Shadows come from the neutral dark cut with the dominant color of the area it falls on.
Apply color loosely and quickly. Urban sketching color is not about precise rendering. It is about capturing the impression of light and mood. A single wash of warm ochre over a sunlit wall does more work than careful detail painting of every stone.
Leave the ink lines to do the structural work. The color layer is atmosphere, not architecture. You can be quite rough with it and still produce something that reads beautifully if the underlying drawing is confident.
One technique that works particularly well for fast location color: drop a concentrated wash into a slightly dampened area and let it bloom and settle on its own. You are not steering every stroke. You are setting conditions and letting the paint find its own edges. With a highly concentrated paint like Peerless DryColor, even a small amount of pigment produces a strong result, which means your fast, loose washes have real presence rather than looking thin and washed out.
Dealing With Public
This is real and worth addressing.
Sketching in public is mildly uncomfortable for most people at first. People look. They ask what you are drawing. Sometimes they stand behind you and watch. Occasionally someone critiques the sketch uninvited.
Most urban sketchers find that this discomfort fades quickly, usually after the first few sessions. Once you are absorbed in looking and drawing, the self-consciousness drops away. You become interested in the scene rather than in how you appear.
A small, inconspicuous kit helps. Someone with a full easel and a palette spread across a folding table attracts attention. Someone with a small sketchbook and what looks like a pen attracts almost none. The Peerless Sidekick in your hand looks like a notebook. A water brush looks like a regular brush. You can work in plain sight without anyone around you understanding that you are painting.
If someone asks what you are doing, showing them is almost always a positive experience. People are curious and kind about it far more often than not.
Starting Points Worth Trying
If you are not sure what to sketch, here are scenes that are forgiving and interesting in roughly equal measure:
Cafes and restaurants. Good light, natural focal points, subjects that stay still (the table, the chairs, the window) even when people come and go. You also have a reason to sit there for a while without looking conspicuous.
Markets. Interesting shapes, strong colors, canopies and stalls that create natural framing. Busy enough that nobody notices you are sketching.
Train stations and transit stops. Architecture that does not move, people who move constantly. Good practice for learning which elements to anchor and which to simplify.
Narrow streets and alleys. Natural linear perspective, interesting shadows, architectural detail that rewards close looking.
Your own neighborhood. The most underrated subject for urban sketching. The places you walk past every day without really seeing them are full of interesting material when you stop and look.
FAQ
Do I need to know how to draw before I start urban sketching? Not well, no. Urban sketching is about looking carefully and translating what you see onto the page. The translation will be imperfect at first, and that is fine. The practice of urban sketching is itself what develops the drawing. Most experienced urban sketchers say they learned to see by sketching, not the other way around. Start with simple subjects and build from there.
What is the best watercolor paint for urban sketching? The best paint for urban sketching is the most portable, fastest to set up, and least likely to cause problems on location. Peerless DryColor sheets are highly concentrated, fully dry, and activate instantly with a wet brush. They require no palette, no open lid, and no water jar, which means you can work in any position without worrying about spills or setup time. Paired with a water brush, they are the most location-ready watercolor format available.
Can I use a water brush instead of a regular brush for urban sketching? Yes, and for most urban sketching purposes a water brush is more practical than a regular brush. The built-in water reservoir eliminates the need for a separate jar, which changes what environments you can paint in. You can sketch standing up, on a narrow surface, in a moving vehicle, or anywhere a jar would be impossible. A paper towel pressed against the tip serves as your rinse. For urban sketching, a water brush is not a compromise: it is the practical choice.
How do I stop my watercolor paper from buckling when I sketch outside? Use paper that is at least 140lb (300gsm). Below that weight, watercolor will buckle the paper badly regardless of technique. For outdoor work, watercolor blocks (sheets glued on all four sides) stay flat during painting because the edges are held in place. Alternatively, tape loose sheets or spiral-bound journals to a firm backing board. Cold press surface (slightly textured) is the most forgiving choice for beginners.
How long does an urban sketch take? Most urban sketches take between fifteen minutes and an hour, depending on complexity and how much detail you add. A quick location impression can be done in five to ten minutes. A more developed scene with careful ink work and layered color might take ninety minutes. For beginners, setting a timer for twenty minutes and working to complete something in that window is a useful discipline. It forces decisions and prevents overworking.
Ready to Try It?
The Peerless Sidekick gives you eight vibrant colors, a built-in mixing surface, and a format small enough to carry everywhere without thinking about it. Pair it with a waterproof fineliner, a water brush from the Peerless watercolor supplies and a small watercolor sketchbook, and you have a complete urban sketching kit that fits in a jacket pocket.
Pick somewhere interesting. Sit down. Look at it for a few minutes before you touch the page. Then draw what you see, not what you think it looks like. That is where urban sketching begins.