# Urban Travel Sketching: Capture a Favourite Place in Watercolor - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/urban-travel-sketching-capture-a-favourite-place-in-watercolor/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Solid intro · Rated 7 /10 # Urban Travel Sketching: Capture a Favourite Place in Watercolor Updated September 2026 Nic Squirrell · Artist and illustrator Beginner · 36 min It teaches you to read a place before you paint it, but leaves the actual watercolor technique mostly undemonstrated. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Furban-travel-sketching-capture-a-favourite-place-in-watercolor%2F483108465) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Urban Travel Sketching is built around a clever premise: instead of drawing one building accurately, you study a whole neighborhood, break it into recurring parts, and reassemble those parts into a townscape that never existed but still feels true. Nic Squirrell demonstrates the process using Winchelsea, a small medieval town in Sussex, painted entirely from a walk around and a set of reference photos. The course's real strength is its middle section, Explore and Assess, which is essentially a long, specific checklist of what to look at: roof materials and pitch, chimney pot shapes, whether windows have shutters or curtains, what sits on balconies, the style of house numbers, even whether the street is full of bicycles or mopeds. This is the one part of the class that could genuinely change how a student looks at a place, and it works whether you're standing on the street or scrolling through Street View from home. The instruction to look for details that repeat across several buildings, rather than one-off flourishes an owner happened to like, is a small but useful piece of visual literacy. The sketching and composition lessons that follow are practical without being padded. Squirrell shows three ways to lay out a collection of building sketches on a page: scattered across the space, lined up as a townscape, or organized on a loose grid, each illustrated with a finished example from a different location. Choosing to draw buildings separately and combine them later, rather than copying one street scene directly, is presented clearly enough that a beginner could apply it to any subject. Where the course thins out is the actual painting. Once the pencil composition is traced onto watercolor paper, the demonstration moves quickly through blocking in dilute washes, letting wet paint spread, and adding shadow tones, but the teacher explicitly declines to name colors or explain the mixes being used, framing it as a way to protect personal style. That choice is defensible as pedagogy, but it also means a true watercolor beginner gets no anchor for how to approach pigment ratios, water control, or layering, techniques usually central to a watercolor class. The final details, window highlights added with a white opaque pen, chimney pots, and soft ground shadows, are shown rather than taught step by step. At 36 minutes, the class covers observation, sketching, composition, and painting in one sitting, which is efficient but also means each painting stage gets only a few minutes of screen time. Materials are listed thoroughly, including 300gsm watercolor paper, professional-grade paints, waterbrushes, and a light box, but none of it is mandatory, and the teacher repeatedly stresses that any equivalent will do. This suits someone who already has basic drawing confidence and wants a method for translating a place into a personal, stylized painting, not someone looking for a paint-along watercolor tutorial with explained color mixing. Treated as a lesson in observation and composition, it delivers. Treated as a watercolor techniques class, it is thinner than the title suggests. The standout The location-scouting checklist in Explore and Assess, which turns casual observation into a repeatable method for finding what makes any street look like itself. ## What you will learn - · How to scout a location, in person or via Google Street View, for architectural details worth sketching - · A structured checklist for spotting repeating local features: roof shapes, chimney pots, shutters, door surrounds, balconies - · How to sketch building elements separately, then recombine them into an invented composite scene rather than a single accurate building - · Three layout strategies for arranging multiple sketches on a page: scattered, stacked townscape, and grid - · How to transfer a rough pencil composition onto watercolor paper using a light box or window - · A basic wash sequence for blocking in buildings, roofs, and shadows, finished with a white opaque pen for highlights Best for: Beginners who enjoy travel and architecture and want a method for turning a place into a sketch, even if they've never picked up a paintbrush before. Skip it if: Anyone wanting explicit color-mixing formulas, named watercolor techniques, or a painting of one specific recognizable landmark. Helpful Examples Engaging Teacher Clarity of Instruction Actionable Steps [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Furban-travel-sketching-capture-a-favourite-place-in-watercolor%2F483108465)