London Urban Sketching

I had the fantastic opportunity through Thomas More University to study abroad in London! I went with several other art students to learn the art of urban sketching with our professor Elizabeth Neale. It was an incredible time and one of the coolest two weeks of my life! I’m also incredibly proud of the art we were all able to create as a group. All our notebooks were collected and turned into an exhibit at Thomas More as well when we returned!

I’m going to go over the different locations we went to roughly in chronological order. We weren’t always able to finish our watercolor sketches on location, so several of the paintings were finished after the fact. But this will be the basic order we went to each location.

First we took a short walk from our hotel to Russel Square, a small park with plenty areas for seating. Here is where I finished the first sketch, and is also where I took a photo of the general setup for the next two weeks. We bought a small watercolor set with plenty of room for mixing colors and adding more. We also had tiny little sketch books we carried around with pencils to use if we couldn’t use our watercolors. There were several locations, like the British Museum, that didn’t allow us to bring water inside.

The next day, we visited Chinatown, which was absolutely beautiful. It was some of the most delicious food I’ve ever had there - if you ever find yourself in London, go to Cafe TPT and order the barbeque pork noodles. Anyway, in between eating barbeque and taiyaki, I painted one of the Chinese lions scaling the side of the building.

By our hotel was a small cafe right outside. Normally it was very busy in the mornings, but a few times I was able to get myself a table to eat their crepes. They had a very wide variety of sweet and savory crepes, and I tried a banana and Nutella one. It was delicious, even more than how it looks in the photo! Later that day, we visited some gardens and parks in Kensington. This painting was from Kyoto Garden specifically - which is also where the photo of me on the home page is from!

We also checked out the Brompton Cemetery, which was a really interesting and historical place to walk through. There were a lot of really amazing statues and mausoleums around with interesting reliefs. Three of my final paintings ended up being from here. One of them is my favorite painting from the whole trip, the Time Machine. It’s a weird little structure that has some tall tales surrounding it. Supposedly there’s a puzzle you can crack that will result in the doors opening up and showing you.. something! No one knows what’s inside. But it’s a beautiful structure. I also painted several of the graves and statues about. It was almost comical how many crows there were throughout the cemetery, it was very thematic.

It was important for us to get some traditional British tea at a teahouse! We had a full meal with tiered dishes and different kinds of very tasty finger foods. The tea was also delicious, this whole trip inspired me to get into brewing my own tea at home.

One of the final few days of the trip ended with us visiting two really iconic buildings in London. One was the London bridge! Well, at least one of the many London bridges, the iconic one people usually call “The London Bridge” is called the Tower Bridge and is the one I chose to paint. We took a ferry ride through the river Thames so we got to see the bridge very up close and personal. It was really amazing, the pictures don’t do it justice. We also visited the Battersea Power Station, which is just outside of London, and for a long time was a defunct factory. But at one point, it was fully gutted and turned into a shopping mall - a very expensive shopping mall as well. We spent a lot of time walking around the outside because of how HUGE the building is. We didn’t spend much time inside because being this far into the trip, we were running low on fun money to spend!

And that’s the highlights of the trip! We of course visited many other locations and painted other things, but these are my absolute favorite pieces!