Hi, I’m Liz Steel!
I’m an obsessive sketcher from Sydney Australia who loves sketching my life and sharing the experience.
I want to inspire and enable anyone who wants to be an urban sketcher to develop the skills and the confidence to sketch anything at any time – to tackle complex scenes out on location even when there isn’t a lot of time.
I’m an architect by profession and a little over 10 years ago I was bogged down with the grind of a demanding career. I spent a lot of my spare time indoors (reading architectural history and theory books).
When I was on vacation, I took photos non-stop in a desperate attempt to capture everything. I would occasionally do a few little sketches (in a black fineliner) but longed to have a consistent sketching habit and actually complete a sketchbook.
It all changed when I discovered that there was such a thing as watercolour pans in a compact field kit.
I knew then that it was what I wanted to sketch with, so I rushed out to buy one. I then started training for a five-week overseas trip. I filled 2 sketchbooks during the trip and as a result was completely hooked.
Sketching (and using watercolour in particular) has given me a way of responding to the world around me in a loose and spontaneous way. And at the same time I’m creating a visual narrative of my life.
I don’t want my sketches to be perfect, instead I want to take risks and have fun at the same time.
After 6 years of obsessive sketching I made the big decision to leave my architectural job (which I loved) and have a 6-month break to ‘do more art and a little teaching’. As soon as I did that, things started to happen and I knew that I would never go back to architecture as my primary career.
Now, I am working full-time as an artist, blogger and teacher.
My big desire is to share with you the ideas behind my loose and fast sketching and to help you have more fun sketching. My looseness is in fact grounded in tight thinking – a result of my architect’s brain which is highly analytical.
I believe in digging deep and discovering core concepts that will enable you to build a solid foundation for your own style of sketching.
SketchingNow is the place where I share the concepts that will improve your sketching and take it to the next level.
As well as teaching here on SketchingNow I also share regular updates on my blog, Instagram, and Youtube with the goal of inspiring the thousands of people who follow me in order to keep going in their own creative pursuits.
I am an Urban Sketcher correspondent, founder of Urban Sketchers Australia and a regular instructor at the annual International Urban Sketchers symposium.
I teach face-to-face workshops locally in Australia and all around the world.
In 2016 I published a book called 5 Minute Sketching: Architecture which is full of my best tips for sketching buildings – either quickly or slowly!
If you want to keep up to date with my adventures, get early notifications of my workshops and earlybird pricing for new SketchingNow courses, please signup for my newsletter.
