While we talked, I did some reflex sketching of the things on my desk.

The funny thing was that my desk was clear when we started the call (as I was prepping for a livestream inside my Travel Sketching course), but throughout the 2-hour conversation, my supplies came out and spread everywhere.

In a way, I was drawing the objects that were forming the negative space in this recent sketch (part of our Framing month inside my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon – see this article for more)

Although it was really fun to draw some of my current art supplies while talking to Andrew, I actually wanted to do an updated overall ‘deskscape’ so I could compare it with this sketch I did a year ago while talking to Suhita.

My filming desk is now surrounded by more art materials – mainly due to my weekly Patreon videos and all the mixed media work I’ve done in the past 18 months.

As I was writing this blog article, I realised that I have sketched my desk – my workspace – over the years, and it would be fun to Explore the Archives and put a little collection together. 

It’s quite topical as we’ve just finished a Group Event inside my Edges course and one of the exercises in the second half of the course was to draw our workspace, thinking about varying our lines.

This is a sketch of my computer workspace from my studio when I lived in Lindfield.

Another version of the same view (this one in watercolour) when I was using the wall behind my computer as a Kanban board. I no longer use this method (I’m not sure why!)

A quick, continuous line drawing of the stuff on my drawing/filming desk.

  
And another simplified version, which also included one of my light boxes, my overhead camera and an everyday lamp, all overlapping.

Note: I looked through my sketches from 2020 and 2021 (the lockdown years) expecting to find many sketches of my desk, but was surprised there were only a few. I mainly sketched individual objects.

Here is a fun sketch made at my filming desk to record all the cameras I used for my Sketchbook Design course. I filmed all those videos myself.

And the inset on this page documents all the positions. Note: the border around this inset is not the size of the room. It was a small space, but not that small!

Going deeper into the archives…

Here a few sketches from a previous home, where I had an unusual  L-shaped studio

Out of interest, this is where I filmed my Foundations, Edges and Buildings courses.

Here is the view of my computers and drawing board from the ‘comfy chair’ position.

A more detailed view of my computer – including a teacup and teapot with a cosy on the side!

This sketch ended up on the cover of a book! I wrote two chapters in this book – one of them was all about sketching workplaces.

I can’t look at the above layout of my studio without getting a bit emotional about my huge drawing board and left-handed drafting machine. I loved my left-handed drafting machine so much!

The board was too big, so we cut it down, making the drafting machine useless. And now it’s in storage, as I don’t have room for even the reduced-size drawing board and stand.

Here is an even older sketch (from 2011) showing my full-size board and machine in action. 

While thinking about my architectural background, let’s go even deeper into the archives…

The last few sketches were done in the office when I worked full-time as an architect – these seem a lifetime ago. It is, in fact, 14 years since I left, so some of these sketches are older than that!

Let’s start with my tea-drinking habits in the office.

Even though I hadn’t quite become a full-time teacup-and-saucer user back then, I always made myself a pot of tea with loose-leaf tea.

And by the time I did this sketch, I was using a teacosy on that pot. Lots of other little work memories prompted by this rough sketch.

I love the notes included on this page. 

We didn’t have a dedicated secretary, and we all took turns answering incoming calls but for some reason, I sat at the desk with the switch. We all worked in one room, so I didn’t need all the extra functions and never transferred a call.

And the last one is a little dramatic. It’s more of a nightmare than a nice memory! 🙂

It’s been really fun to put this article together! While I’ve been going down my own personal memory lane, you have probably been noticing the changes in my sketching style. 🙂

It’s been a good reminder to sketch complete ‘deskscapes’ more often, not just individual objects, since the main elements and layout of my workspaces constantly change.

There is something special about the memories that everyday sketches bring back… and the more boring and mundane the subjects, the more interesting they become as the years go by.

How often do you draw your workspace?

The post Always a good subject to draw: what's on my desk? appeared first on Liz Steel.

Thanks to our ‘Darks’ themes this month inside my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon, I’m doing some night sketching. And loving it!

Here is the side door to St Andrews Cathedral and the entrance to Sydney Town Hall.

It’s the perfect time of the year for night sketching here in Sydney, as it’s getting darker earlier, but it’s not too cold yet.

On Friday, I published a video inside the community explaining my current steps for night sketching and how they relate to what I’ve been doing with backlighting in my early morning sketching.

The post Night Sketching appeared first on Liz Steel.

There are lots of different aspects possible to this theme  – focusing on shadow shapes and starting with the darks, painting black objects, using more dark colours, night sketching.

I’m exploring all of these… but I’m also doing a series of sketches containing early-morning backlit subjects and I’m really thinking about the values of the light side vs the dark side. (BTW Value was our February theme!)

I’m also continuing to use a new triad I put together during our ‘three’ theme in March (see the bottom of this article and the comment section for more about it… until I have time to write a dedicated blog article on it). 

And you might also notice that in the top image, I’m still using Framing (our April theme) and Inktense (something I discovered using January’s Unused Supplies theme)

Hmmm, this year, the monthly themes from our Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon are really having a lasting impact on my everyday sketching!

The post Backlighting appeared first on Liz Steel.

This will be a chance to work through the lessons with an inspiring group of sketchers from around the world and participate in 3 bonus weekly livestreams. Find out more about the schedule and the dates of the live streams here.

If you have purchased the Travel Sketching course previously, you have access to this Live Version for free! Simply visit the Travel Sketching classroom via Sketchingnow.com / My Account/My Courses and look for the big blue button!

I’m super happy that my 7 lines – 5 shapes – 3 layers techniques have helped lots of people sketch more when they are travelling or simply out and about with others.

Here is what people are saying about this approach:

“This course has had far more impact and inspired me more than I expected. The teaching has been fantastic – the way it is accessible at whatever level you are, with concepts you can take away and apply to your own style and integrate into however you like to work, is genius.”
– Abi

“This course has helped me approach travel sketching in a new way. Instead of thinking that I have to set aside a chunk of time to get in my sketch, I now have tools to sketch on the go. I now feel more excited about trying a quick sketch that I can keep simple.”
– Marta

“Great course, I’m thrilled to now have a simple but effective system (3-5-7) to refer to when faced with a complex scene but also to have the confidence to attempt a super quick sketch when time is short.”
– Louise

“So many times in the past I haven’t sketched anything thinking I didn’t have enough time, now I’ve got the confidence (and great tips and shortcuts) to get any scene down on paper quickly. Thank you.”
– Anna

“I vastly enjoyed this class and learned so much. I feel I significantly levelled up in my understanding of practical applications, as well as in how to manage my overwhelm in the moment. So helpful!”
– Jamie

“Wow, I am blown away by how the concepts in this course are changing the way I sketch. Any trepidation I felt when starting a sketch has disappeared. I just love how this course complements the lessons in the other Sketching Now courses.”
– Naomi

I designed this course specifically to address the biggest hurdles the SketchingNow community faces when travel sketching. The top two challenges were:

1. Finding the time to sketch when travelling with others.
2. Knowing how to choose a scene and exactly where to start.

To solve these, I developed my 7 lines – 5 shapes – 3 layers approach to sketching on the go!

The goal is to get you sketching regardless of a non-stop itinerary or a complex scene.

You can use these techniques for quick sketches or as the first step to a more detailed sketch.

You’ll learn how to:

• prepare for a sketching trip and set achievable sketching goals
• work with a limited palette that is lightweight and easy to use for both quick and elaborate sketches
• capture the important parts of a scene using 7 lines
• create eye-catching colourful sketches with 5 shapes using watercolour pencils
• develop techniques for sketching complex scenes in various media using 3 layers.

Throughout this 3-week course, you’ll learn how to apply my 7-5-3 method to a wide range of different scenes and be part of an inspiring cohort of sketchers from around the world. Look at all these amazing examples from the classroom!

I only host a Live Version of Travel Sketching once a year – so I don’t want you to miss out joining us!

I can’t wait!

Join the Live Version of Travel Sketching

Quickly transform the blank page to capture the beauty of the place where you are

Live Version starting on 16 April 2025
3-week course with community
and 3 bonus livestreams

Please let me know if you have any questions about the course or the Live Version!

The post Live Version of Travel Sketching starting next week - 13 May 2026 appeared first on Liz Steel.

I’ve been using Inktense pencils and Tombow markers for the last few months (thanks to our ‘Unused Supplies’ January theme inside my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon) and since my New Zealand trip, I’ve tried to reduce my selection. It’s  been so hard to do this as there are just so many nice colours – particularly in Tombow!

The above image shows what I’ve ended up with, and I’ve been happy using these in the past few weeks. The main strategy behind this selection is that it roughly follows the colours of my Travel Sketching watercolour pencil selection (see below), and the marker set is generally lighter to balance the dark, intense colours of the Inktense pencils. Refer to my Framing sketches (see article here) for ways I’ve used these pencils and markers.

(Note: The Born markers are an Australian equivalent, which are much cheaper.)

I am missing these Tombow colours, though, and since I did the above colour chart, I have added N65 and 451 back into my set.

Important Note: The purpose of this blog article is to document what I’ve been using so that I can more easily answer people when asked for the name/number of a specific colour. This is not a recommendation. 🙂 It might change at any time.

I’ve really enjoyed using Inktense lately and you might be wondering whether I prefer them over Albrecht Durer watercolour pencils. The quick answer is that I’m not sure – I like both!

And so I’ve just swapped out the above Inktense pencils for the Travel Sketching set of watercolour pencils. (See, I told you that things could change at any time!)

This is the mixing page I did immediately after this change. Oh ah! Such pretty colours!

I’ll be doing a demo using watercolour pencils and Tombows during the Live Version of my Travel Sketching course starting 13 May – I would love to have you join us! Find out more here.

The post My current Inktense and Tombow Selection appeared first on Liz Steel.

I have a strong preference for open-ended sketches, starting at my focus and working outwards in a spontaneous way (Foundations Lesson 11) so having an entire month of trying to contain my sketches using framing devices has been radical for me. But oh! so much fun!

I had lots of different starting ideas (you can get a glimpse of them here) but in the end I focused on using foreground elements and often converted them into a negative space frame. I tried using trees, buildings, windows and narrow streets as frames and thought about white vs dark frames.

I explored ways of using these framing techniques for the 3 layers approach from my Travel Sketching course (if you haven’t already heard I’m hosting a Live Version of Travel Sketching starting 13 May 2026 – find out more here).

I was also very interested in discovering when the frame or the sketch itself became the more dominant feature in the end result. 

So many ideas to explore!

As always, this month inside the community I filmed weekly update videos explaining the ideas I was working through and then last week we had our usual monthly livestream where I went through all my work, answered questions and did a demo. So much fun to hang out with everyone.

Here are some highlights from my framing month….

A few local sketches… side framing

Top framing

Top and bottom framing with lots of negative space

Beecroft Note: if you are part of the community you will know that this is a cropped version 🙂

The view into the garden from my friends’ place.

Then a few sketches from photos. These were from a trip to Europe when I first started sketching.

Back then I took way more photos and seemed to have quite a few framed compositions. 🙂

City Sketching… you’ve seen these two before but this image shows you how they sit next to each other in my sketchbook

Foundations Park in The Rocks – trying buildings and a sandstone cliff as a framing device.

 
Sitting in the colonnade of a Jimmy B building (the GPO in Martin Place).

And finally two table-top sketches. You’ve seen the first one before. 🙂

At the time I felt tempted to add the black table shape but decided to leave it as it was – I was chatting with my friends and knew I wasn’t concentrating enough to make an informed decision.

So I decided to do another version.

This is my afternoon cup of tea on my filming desk! I loved doing this sketch!

Thanks to everyone who is part of my Sketching Adventure Community and especially those who have been joining in with the Framing fun! You are all so inspiring!

The post Framing my compositions appeared first on Liz Steel.

I love sketching food! It adds so much colour and texture to my sketchbook pages and is a great memory of times with friends (without making them feel uncomfortable by drawing them – I prefer to sketch strangers!).

In this article I want to share a few of my recent food and drink sketches.

This first one was from Easter Saturday when I spent the day catching up with friends on the Central Coast. Even though it was a wet day we had a lovely time outside in their back terrace area. This was a relaxed setting for sketching food as we were sitting at the table for hours and there was no hot food – so no time pressures!

I was experimenting with our current Patreon theme of Framing with this one.

The next sketch was more pressured – hot food during lunch with a friend in Eastwood.

It is much harder to sketch food when at a restaurant with a friend so often I simply get the outline loosely drawn, take a photo and then come back and add more details and colour later (ie. when my friend is in the middle of telling me an involved story).

BTW if any of my readers have any suggestions for places to visit in Eastwood I’d love to know! I lived in Eastwood for the first 7 years of my life and it’s changed a lot since then. I should definitely visit this suburb more often 🙂

Other times I take a photo and sketch later (my niece cooked dinner). Thinking about Lesson 2 indoor exercise from my Edges course (Hard and Soft Edges) while doing this.

And sometimes I’m on my own but hungry! So this is an example of a rushed sketch.

As for hot drinks… sketching tea is easier than coffee as the tea remains hot in the pot.

Cast iron teapot with Oolong tea and some Pink Flamingo Inktense (my current favourite colour!)

My strategy for coffees is to draw the surface of the coffee first and then draw the cup around it. This particular sketch was done during the OneWeek100People challenge so was done very quickly so I could get back to drawing people.

Ah! remember when I used to do a coffee sketch every morning? I prefer to be sketching outdoor scenes these days and soaking up some morning sun so it’s rare for me in my everyday life to actually sit in a cafe and order a coffee.

More tea…I really don’t need it! Lots of fun loose strokes in this one.

And just to finish off this article, here are a few of my food sketches from my trip to Wellington NZ back in January. One of the ways I like to relax when I’m travelling is to have a leisurely solo cafe sketching session.

Ah! I think it’s time for a cuppa now 🙂

The post Recent food and drink sketches appeared first on Liz Steel.

Today I’m sharing highlights from my sketches of Sydney City which I do on Wednesdays in the late afternoon before going to a mid-week meeting at my church. Some weeks I have too much work to make it a sketching outing, but I do try to sneak in a sketch most weeks.

These were all done to fit in with our Sketching Adventure Community monthly themes:

Unused Supplies in January, Value in February, Three in March and Framing in April.

And once again I’m sharing them in random order.

St Mary’s Cathedral using framing

Empty foodcourt using 2 x 3 media – 3 x Inktense and 3 x Tombows

3 layers of people in Haymarket – three layers at St Andrews Cathedral and some framing.

Three trees in The Rocks and making some friends from WA and VIC who sat and sketched with me.

Town Hall – starting with the darks (part of our Value theme) and demonstrating that value is more important than hue as I used three different coloured Tombows in the dark area.

Empty Foodcourt – using Values and starting with the darks.

Framing using a tree and garden bed of Hyde Park looking towards the Australian Museum.

And the last sketch in this article was done back in January using my Unused Supplies and three inktense pencils and three Tombows. It was a super quick sketch done before meeting up with my friend Olga from Auckland. I love having dry and quick drying media for super quick sketches in half-opportunities.

The post Recent City sketching - towers and interiors appeared first on Liz Steel.

This means that before I start my workday I have done a sketch and I’ve gotten my creative juices flowing. I’m also keeping an internal dialogue happening so that I can make the most out of any dedicated sketching outing ( it’s like doing scales before a performance). Some mornings I can focus on my sketch and some days I’m rushed and just go through the motions but my regular sketching habit is always good for me! (Read more about this here).

The biggest challenge with this type of sketching habit is keeping myself inspired because the subject matter is repetitive – I’m returning to the same locations over and over. And this is why in recent years I started changing my media so that I had something new to focus on. But there is a limit to how often you can change media and it’s easy to become overwhelmed  and end up spending a lot of money!

However having different conceptual themes to focus doesn’t have these problems. This is because they help me to change the way I see my subject – developing my observational and interpretive skills!

And this is why our monthly themes inside my Sketching Adventure Community has been so incredibly impactful to my everyday sketching!

So far this year we have focused on Unused Supplies in January, Value in February, Three in March and now this month we are looking at Framing. In this article I’ll share some highlights from my everyday sketching that cover these themes. 

But before that… there is another challenge related to a regular sketching habit. And that is… I end up filling a lot of sketchbooks and then have to work out a sustainable way to share them. 🙂

There is no doubt that my weekly update videos and monthly livestreams inside my Community is the best way to share my everyday sketches as a whole but I do want to continue sharing the highlights here. Last week I decided that it was time to rebuild my relationship with my scanner (it has been feeling very neglected lately!)  and re-visit the process of publishing scanned versions of my work. The result is that over the next week or so, I’ll get up to date with this year’s sketching. I hope you enjoy it!

Just for fun, I’m not going to put the images in order so this collection of morning sketches is totally random. I’ll include a brief description of which theme I was using.

The above sketch is one that I’m very happy with as it combines Inktense pencils and Tombow Markers in an interesting way. Note: I started using Inktense and Tombows as part of our Unused Supplies month and I’m still using them!

Okay… now time for the rest of the collection!

Framing: A dark shape for the foreground trees.

Framing: Is one white tree doing enough?

Value: Three-colour value study (rather than grey monochrome)

Unused Supplies: Tombows

Value: Adjusting the values of a scene which was mostly mid-tone

Values: Alternation – a concept I started thinking about at the very end of the value month.

Unused Supplies: Two quick little Inktense and Tombow sketches

Three: Using a new triad

Three: Three layers (a concept from my Travel Sketching course)

Three: Three Passes plus 3×3 media

Three: Three passes

Framing:  Extending my sketch to include a foreground element as a framing device

Value: Monochrome value study and colour study

Value: Starting with the darks

Three: Three houses

Three: Only using three tools for a sketch

Three: Three objects in foreground and three layers

Three: Three layers (different base colour for each)

Three: Using a triad (I had a few big lightbulb moments using a triad during the month which I shared in our monthly livestream).

I hope you have enjoyed seeing these (scanned) sketches! Hmm… Can you tell that it’s a big deal for me that I scanned so many sketches last week? I’m very proud of the achievement 🙂

Next article I’ll share some of my City sketches that I’ve done this year. So stay tuned for that!

If you are interested in joining us in the Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon – find out more here. 

The post Thoughts on building a regular sketching habit appeared first on Liz Steel.

Back home I did some sketches from photos. (Hmm, emus are lots of fun to draw and so are boobook owls).

I then did some research on three of the animals we saw in the nocturnal house. I know about bandicoots and potoroos but I had never come across a bettong before.  My nieces and nephews said they look like a mini-kangaroo with a possum head. There is no doubt that they are very cute. Check out two YouTube videos here and here.

And while thinking about Australian marsupials – this is the time of the year when I always think about bilbies as I have a tradition of buying a chocolate bilby every Easter.

Last year I sketched a foreshortened bilby (see here). but this year I was more interested in comparing them with bettongs. (The comparison sketch is a bit of a guess!)

I’m really happy that I now know about bettongs!

Let me know in the comments below if you live in Australia and have been ignorant about them as well.

The post Discovering bettongs (a cute Australian animal) appeared first on Liz Steel.