Analog urban sketching with a touch of digital coloring

Here are some urban sketches (from direct observation) done during art school class time. We went to the Singapore Botanic Gardens to sketch recently. Since the brief to the class was to draw in the A4 size, I'd to lead by example and not draw in my usual small comic panel size.

I used a charcoal pencil on Fabriano Schizzi 90gsm A4 paper. Charcoal gave me a pleasantly broad line and that helped me cover more ground quicker and it also forced me to simplify. Loved how I was able to create quick mid-tone areas just by rubbing the charcoal. I also loved the messy dirty textures charcoal makes on paper. Each picture took about 10-20 mins. And I mainly focused on combining shapes, and observing the light and dark values.

How did I add in the color in? That's using photoshop. I didn't want to display these as just pure charcoal on paper sketches. I'm not an analog purist neither do I like to do everything digitally. As an illustrator, I want to be open to many ways to create images. I find that combining both analog and digital does open more possibilities on what looks I can achieve. But it does takes restraint not to overdo the digital part. Perhaps it's about using digital tools in such a way that the results still looks like it could have been done entirely with analog tools and mediums. I like this look as using a touch of digital tools gives it some element of surprise.

Below was a sketch doing urban sketching with my daughter Ollie.

And this was at the dentist clinic waiting for Ollie while she got her teeth cleaned.