Sketching is storytelling. It is about capturing the moment and its essence. It increases visual and spatial awareness and is extremely accessible as a tool for any creative process. It is emotionally rewarding as an artistic endeavor, and if done right, can be meditative as well. Whenever I visit local coffee shops or travelling, even though I like to sit back, relax and take in the scene, I don’t always have a lot of time to sketch. Therefore, it is important for me to be able to capture the essence of the space quickly, without worrying much about accuracy and getting bogged down by the details. In this workshop we will work on honing the skills needed to capture the essentials, by incorporating fast confident lines and reducing the scene to its basic elements — shapes, layers and lines. We will perform exercises to get us comfortable in creating bold and confident lines, to discern basic shapes in a scene, and compose the final sketch. Participants may choose to use pen, marker or pencil to create black and white line drawings.

Supply list

• Your favorite pen, marker or pencil to create black and white line drawings.
• Here are some of my favorite sketching tools:
  • Lamy Safary fountain pen
  • Hong Dian Forest Series fountain pen with bent nib
  • Papermate Flair Pen with medium nib
  • Pentel mechanical pencil 0.7/0.9 mm with 2B lead
  • Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pens – soft and hard tip
  • Tombow Dual Brush Pen Art Markers, Grayscale 
  • Moleskine Art Sketchbook
  • Stillman & Birn Epsilon Series

About the instructor

Andika Murandi

Andika’s love for sketching started when he studied architecture in Indonesia. As a practicing architect, he always try to find time to keep his passion of hand drawing and sketching alive. He goes to different local coffee shops every Friday morning for his weekly sip ‘n sketch session. Good mocha and a sketch go so well together. Andika uses his sketches to capture the essence of place and time, using simple pen, marker, pencil, or digital media. He works in downtown Seattle and lives with his wife, two daughters and a cat in Bothell.