I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos lately about urban sketchbooking. My favorite artist is Becky Cao in Vancouver, British Columbia. Like many urban sketchbookers, she boldly skips sketching with a pencil and goes straight to her fountain pen to draw the scene in front of her.

I’m particularly impressed because I’ve always been a tentative pencil sketcher. I put down a line, erase it, and repeat over and over. My lines are usually so faint that they’re barely visible when I photograph them. For a long time, I figured that was the way everybody did it.

Then I started watching all of these urban sketchers, including Becky. My first reaction to her straight to the pen sketching was shock. I could never, ever do it that way!

But then I kept watching Becky and listening to her narration, and I began to see the beauty in what she and other sketchbook artists do. They’re capturing the scene before them in the moment, not giving themselves a chance to second guess or try to perfect it. They just go for it, and there’s something fresh, honest and real in that approach.

I finally decided to give it a try myself.

My husband and I recently went to Yorktown, Virginia for a day trip. The weather was crazy warm for the end of October, bright and sunny. We strolled along the waterfront, had lunch at an outdoor table and then sat on a bench at the waterfront to watch the world go by.

I’d brought my sketchbooking supplies, including my new fountain pen. My husband, always game, brought some art supplies too. I pulled out my sketchbook and pen, and after nearly talking myself out of it, I started sketching (meanwhile, my husband was busily sketching away).

Here’s the scene that was in front of us:

I pulled out my pen and started sketching. Unfortunately, I immediately discovered that the ink was blue. Oh well, too late I figured and kept sketching. That my husband was well along in his sketch provided me the determination to keep going.

Somehow I managed it, sketching with a pen. And while the results weren’t great, they weren’t too awful either–it was recognizable as a scene with a bridge anyway.

When I was done, I decided that it needed some color (besides the bold blue of the ink). But the only other art media we had with us was a small set of dollar store colored pencils that we’d bought somewhere along the way. I pulled them out and applied color to my sketch, and here was the result:

Hmm…not great, I thought. I figured it would look better with more color, but I just couldn’t force more color onto the page with those dollar store colored pencils.

The other day I went through my sketchbook and came upon the bridge sketch. I decided to try to make the colors more intense, so I pulled out my Prismacolor pencils and applied another layer of color, but the waxy buildup from the first layer limited how much color was taken up by the paper.

Here it is after using the Prismacolors:

I still wasn’t happy with the muted color and all the white spots from the tooth of the textured paper. Then I remembered the blending pencils that I bought a few months ago. Blending pencils are colorless art pencils that blend colored pencils and assist in filling the little spaces on textured paper. As I started firmly stroking the tip of the blending pencil over the sketch, I immediately saw that I had stumbled upon the art tool that I needed to do what I wanted to do.

Below is the sketch after using the blending pencil:

I’m mostly satisfied with the final result. Is this a great piece of art? Of course not! But given that I was drawing with ink for the first time and that it is a fairly complicated structure (what was I thinking?), I think it’s not too bad.

And I’m really glad that I remembered that magic tool of colored pencils, the blending pencil.