HOW TO DRAW AND PAINT BRICKS IN YOUR URBAN SKETCHES

Textures are one of the key ingredients in developing your unique sketching style. They add realism, depth, and energy to your sketches. Today, let’s play with one of the most common and eye-catching urban textures: bricks!

Learning how to draw textures is an important skill if you're looking to create realistic, engaging, and visually-stunning artwork.

Textures allow you to add detail and depth that can help to bring your drawings to life and make them feel more authentic. And one of the most common textures that’s likely to pop up in your urban sketches is bricks.

So, in this post, we’ll cover how to:

• draw bricks with a fineliner,

• paint bricks with watercolor when those bricks are a focus of your sketch, and

• decide where to include these brick textures in your urban sketches for maximum effect.

How to draw bricks with a fineliner

In this step-by-step YouTube tutorial, you’ll learn a technique for drawing bricks with a fineliner. We'll simplify this texture to make it recognizable, and I'll show you how and where to add shadows.

For this tutorial, you will need:

• a graphite pencil,

• fineliners (I use 0.1, 0.3 and 1mm),

• smooth drawing paper.

You can apply this technique to a variety of urban sketching scenes, including city buildings, alleyways and arches.

How to paint bricks with watercolor

In this speed-drawing video, you'll learn my process for painting bricks with watercolor.

This technique works best when the bricks are the focus or a key detail of your urban sketch. The key steps to painting watercolor bricks are:

1. Paint the background using a large brush. Use a lighter color that complements the color of your bricks (eg yellow for orange bricks) and lots of water!

   
   

2. Paint the bricks using a mid-sized brush. If you're just starting out, you could draw the bricks in pencil first, but the great thing about bricks is that they often aren't perfectly shaped! A little variation in how they're layered will make your sketch look more realistic. Change up the colors of your bricks slightly to give them more interest e.g. I've used yellows, oranges and browns here.

   
   

3. Add textures, cracks and shadows to the bricks using a small brush. For this sketch the sun is coming from the top-left corner, so I've added shadows to the right and bottom sides of each brick. You'll also notice that I've concentrated the cracks and dents that I've added to the bricks in the bottom right of the bricks. You can add some splatters with your brush, too!

   
   

4. Add highlights! You can use white gouache or an acrylic marker to add highlights to bricks (on the opposite sides to where you put the shadows). Remember that cracks and dents have highlights too!

For this exercise, you will need:

• watercolors

• watercolor brushes (sizes 2-3, 7-8 and 10-12)

• A5 watercolor paper (100% cotton paper will work best)

• a jar of water and some paper towel

• white gouache or a white acrylic marker.

You don’t need to draw every brick!

So now you've practiced a couple of different ways of sketching bricks, the next step is to think about how you might want to incorporate this texture in to your sketches.

In general, you want to add more texture (and draw more bricks):

• to the details that you want the viewer to focus on. E.g. in the sketch above (left), I wanted to emphasise the archway and circle around the window as they create an interesting pattern.

  
  

• to areas that are darker in value or in shadow. (Conversely, if you are drawing a white, brick building, you don't want to add too many bricks, because it will make the building look like it has a much darker value than you intended).

  
  

• to buildings or objects in the foreground (as compared to buildings in the background).

  
  

In urban sketching, we're generally trying to create a suggestion of texture, rather than create a photo-realistic painting of our scene. You normally won't have time when you're sketching on location to draw in every brick, and it's not necessary. Like in the sketch above (right), you just need to draw a few bricks in key areas to make it clear that a wall is made of brick, and the viewer's eye will fill in the gaps!

How do you feel about adding textures to your sketches? What textures are the most challenging for you to translate on to the page? Let me know in the comments!

Ready to explore more textures?

If you've found these exercises on drawing brick textures engaging and useful, take a look at my four-week short course in Brave Brushes Studio that’s dedicated to learning how to draw textures.

Brave Brushes Studio is my membership that gives you the structured lessons, expert feedback, and creative community you need to truly develop your unique style and make real, tangible progress on your sketching skills. We'd love you to join us!

In this Textures Adventure you’ll create a portfolio of different textures that you can use to make your urban sketches pop! You will learn:

• the importance of using textures in your artwork, using examples from my own sketches,

• how to draw a wide variety of street textures with fineliners, and

• how to paint brick, stone and wood textures with watercolors.

This course is part of the Foundations Roadmap, which is my curated list of short-courses for new members and beginner sketchers that teaches you the foundational techniques of urban sketching. There are also extension exercises for more intermediate students, and replays of previous livestreams where you'll explore some of the tecnhiques in more detail.

Found this post useful? Here’s how you can learn more from me:

Step 1: Subscribe to my weekly newsletters, which include sketching tips, video tutorials and inspiration to improve your confidence and start to develop your own personal style.

Step 2: Subscribe to my YouTube channel where I have a collection of free sketching videos.

Step 3: Join me inside Brave Brushes Studio, my membership for beginner artists and urban sketchers! It's not just another membership - it’s the only membership that gives you the structured lessons, expert feedback, and creative community you need to truly develop your unique style and make real, tangible progress on your sketching skills.