My second workshop at the Toulouse Urban Sketcher’s Symposium with Veronica Lawlor which was all about reportage and capturing stories with your sketches. We did warm up exercises to familiarise ourselves with the area using vignettes and thumbnails, and let our stories evolve organically from the elements that interested and intrigued us.

Inspiration from Andrew James and Amy Stewart about using a road trip to document a travel journey with small and simple thumbnail sketches. I experimented with the idea of sketching from a train using a slowed-down video on YouTube.

Using a sketchbook page full of overlapping people from a cafe during a recent urban sketching outing, I’ve analysed the different ways to improve the composition and layout of the sketch using thumbnail sketches. Experimenting with different layouts by adjusting focal point, increasing negative space, and creating a dynamic shape on the page, and making sure to leave space for a title.