Inside Our First Urban Sketching Cruise
- Blog
- May 13, 2026
- 42 mins
We boarded in Barcelona on a beautiful afternoon. Blue sky, light off the water, the whole quayside looking like a postcard. We sailed overnight, woke up in Palma, and walked off the gangway into biblical rain. The kind of rain that turns paper to mush in seconds. Which is tricky when most of your sketch starts with a water-soluble Tombow brush pen. Ian’s pre-sketch from that morning still shows the moment, actually. A few raindrops caught the grey line just enough to give the whole thing a slightly energetic feel, the kind of accident you’d never plan but wouldn’t change. It wasn’t quite the start we’d had in mind, but it turned out to be a fitting first lesson in urban sketching itself.
"This is urban sketching, this is why it's amazing. You deal with the elements and the challenges of the location, rather than just working from a static photograph."
So we adapted. We headed below deck to a quiet bar we’d found. Ian propped his demo board on a low table, and the sixteen of us shuffled around for a view. What stayed with us by the end of the week wasn’t the locations, although those were lovely once the sky cleared. It was what each person said about their own work, and the friendships that grew up between the sketchbooks.
What a Sketching Cruise Actually Feels Like
The plan on a dry day was simple. Out as a group first thing, morning at the location for the early stages, then back to the ship after lunch for watercolour and the line work in the studio. When the rain hit, we adapted. We still went ashore and walked the location, took photos, noticed details, and Ian would talk us through which view to choose and why. Then back to the ship, into our quiet bar, and the first few stages of the sketch happened there. The watercolour came together in the studio afterwards. We never lost a day to the weather. We just moved indoors and kept going.
The mood was warm from the first session. Up in the studio that afternoon for the watercolour stage, Ian walked us through his palette: five colours maximum, with complementaries doing the heavy lifting because mixing opposites neutralises down to greys and browns that hold together on the page. That’s where “sexy grey” was born. Ian coined the name for a deliberate complementary mix that gave us a neutral sitting in harmony with the colours we were already using, and we all loved it. By midweek the phrase was in regular use across the row of sketchbooks, and people were mixing their own versions of it in the colours they’d chosen for the day.
Building a Sketch in layers
What shifted most in our work over the week wasn’t a new technique. It was getting the hang of Ian’s workflow, knowing which stage we were in and what belonged there. He demonstrates pen placement first, sketching the structural skeleton of the scene with a water-soluble grey brush pen. Then we have a go ourselves with our own initial sketch. After that we go back over it with a more permanent, defined line, tightening up the big shapes and committing to the architecture. Then watercolour. Then a layer of tone work with the Tombow brush pen, which gives the depth and shadow the watercolour can’t quite carry. And finally the detail, which is the bit that makes the whole thing suddenly look real.
Knowing where you are in that sequence changes everything. It stops you trying to fix every problem in one stage. Ian put it like this on the day-two pep talk.
"What tends to happen at this stage, is people start spending a lot longer on the second step. You've done one workshop already, you want to improve. And what happens is you over-draw. You start trying to solve little problems that don't need to be solved, because the colour will solve it for you."
When he got to the watercolour itself, he put it even more plainly. “This painting stage is just a sandwich in between two drawing stages. So we’re not trying to fix everything.”
That sentence got quoted back to us by three different students later in the week. Shirley said at the final evaluation she “learnt how to simplify detail, really loved it.” Betty Jo, who’d been worrying about a too-opaque statue earlier in the week, told the group on the last day that she “recognised she could adapt that with water.” The stages stopped people treating one moment as their last chance. The enhanced learning came from trusting the next stage to carry some of the load.
Permission To Break The Rules
There’s a whole subculture in watercolour around what you’re not supposed to do. Don’t use black. Don’t use white. Don’t mix opaque pigments with transparent ones. Most of us came on the trip carrying a few of these rules in the back of our heads without knowing where they’d come from. Ian’s job, by about day three, seemed to be patiently dismantling them.
"If anybody ever tells you not to use both transparent and opaque, just ask the simple question, why? Because they will not give you a good reason. If anybody says to you don't use black or white again, ask them why? If you need to use black, use black. I use white quite a bit. I'm going to use white in every workshop. There's no time for rules like that."
He told a story about being at art college, with a lecturer who banged on about a watercolour rule until the whole class woke up and asked why. “Because that’s the rule.” “But why not?” “Because that’s the rule.” “Of course,” Ian said, “we all went out and started using black and white.”
You could see the rules dropping off people through the week. Barb spent the last morning mixing her own greys with the colours she had instead of the colours she “should” have, trying what she called “sexy grey” out on her piece. Anja got a colour completely wrong on one of the watercolour days and it turned out beautiful. She wrote it up in her evaluation as “a happy accident with colour, worked out beautiful.” Those aren’t kit problems. They’re rules, lifting.
Choosing a Scene With a Story
Some of the strongest teaching on the trip didn’t happen in front of a sketchbook. It happened on the walk to the sketch spot. At every single location, before anyone touched a pen, Ian would gather us together and sketch out a composition chart for the scene. Sometimes a full pre-sketch on the spot. Other times, when the weather or the timing didn’t allow, a quick thumbnail showing what to keep, what to leave out, where the eye should land. Then he’d turn us loose to walk the location and take photos of the bits we wanted in our own version.
This is the storytelling work that doesn’t show up in a finished sketch but really explains why some sketches work and others don’t. Ian would point at a building and say, “I won’t copy that one, it’s absolutely hideous,” and the ugly buildings became a running joke by the end of the week, suggested with a couple of windows and left at that. Then he’d turn around and get excited about a sandwich board, a drain pipe, the way a pair of no-entry signs break up a row of verticals. “We missed all the tat in the piazza,” he said at one of the ports, “it’s just going to get in the way.” The composition chart was always about what to keep and what to leave out, in that order. Watching him do this, day after day, at port after port, was probably the most useful single thing the trip taught us.
The Marseille morning was a good example. Ian led us past the obvious cathedral view and brought us instead to a slightly grubby little French street with stop signs and bollards and a low rail at the end. He looked around and said, “I just think this scene has got a bit more in it, you know, the stop signs, the bollards, the little rail. It’s swept round, just very, very French.” That evening, during the eval, he asked the group whether they agreed. “The cathedral, it would have been like, oh wow, this is exciting. But it would have been so hard. What would we have done with the colour? It would look silly, wouldn’t it? Whereas this is a much more interesting and intimate kind of scene.”
By the last few ports, students were doing it for themselves. Trudi built her best piece around the way “the flowers trickle out the balcony” rather than the obvious column behind. Barb, who admitted she “might not have seen the composition herself without Ian’s eye,” ended up with arch-and-column pieces she was proud of. Dee added a cat to the foreground of a building piece because she felt like it. The storytelling scene, the second-best view, is what brings honest memories home.
A Whole Day on Location in Malta
By the time we got to Malta the rain had given up and the weather was on our side. We stayed on location the entire day, including the watercolour. No coming back to the studio. No pen-and-line work indoors and colour later. Just one long day of working outside, in good light, on a single piece each, with the breeze drying the washes between layers and the conversation drifting back and forth across the row of sketchbooks.
Jenny, in her final evaluation, said the single thing she’d loved most about the whole week was “being outside painting.” She’d added her own spin rather than replicating Ian’s reference, putting in the flowers that spoke to her, and that was the breakthrough she named. The day in Malta was when it all came together for her. The work that day looked different. It had more breathing room. It had more of the place in it, the heat and the sound and the colour of the actual stone. A few people said in the evening evaluation that the Malta sketches felt closer to what they’d thought “urban sketching outside” was supposed to feel like, and that finally getting a whole day of it was the thing they’d hold on to.
Personal Feedback And Individual Breakthroughs
The thing that gave the trip its real shape was the evening evaluations. Each day, just before dinner, the whole group spread their work out on the floor of the studio and Ian went round talking about each piece in turn. He has a rule about not putting his own work in the row. On the first evening he explained why. “The workshop is not about me. It’s about you. My work is there to help you step by step. But when the workshop’s over, my work disappears, and it’s all about you, it’s all about your learning experience.” Then he added, “It’s not comparing yourself to me. It’s comparing yourself to yourself.”
That framing changed the room. When Ian got to Vicki’s piece on day two he held it up. “Look at that ground. Gorgeous. I love the composition of yours as well. It’s so beautiful and dramatic.” Vicki, who had been struggling with her colours and getting fussy in the bottom of the page, replied with what turned out to be a huge takaway. On the final day she described the whole week in two words: “aha moment.” It traced straight back to that day-two exchange.
"I have learned not to take so much, not to be so fussy. Get it done be done, get in and get out. Especially with the details but also the colour, because I was trying to do too much colour."
One of the real benefits of working with Ian in person is that students get to set the agenda. You can ask the specific question that has been nagging at you, the moment it comes up, and have it answered against your own piece rather than waiting to see if a video will cover it later. Barb stopped Ian mid-paint one afternoon and asked, “Can you define for me what you mean when you say ‘tone’?” Ian: “Tone is really where you’ve got the measurements of how dark or how light something is.” Barb thought about it. “I like ‘tone’ better, it makes more sense to me. A real question, a real answer, in front of everyone, with permission to disagree with the textbook.
Other people had their own moments. Valerio went from tight, controlled lines on day one to what he and Ian both called “looser lines, stronger colours” by the end. Keelin, slow and precise to start, said she “felt she took off, not relying on Ian.” John, who described himself as “fast careless” at the start, said by the last day he’d “learnt to slow down.” Alison’s first sketch of the trip changed her trajectory in her own words, and the way her buildings leaned in a bit, “not straight up and down,” became her signature by the last few ports.
The friendships made on a week like this don’t fade when you fly home. We’d set up a group chat before the trip for logistics, but by midweek it was full of jokes, photos, dinner plans, and quiet check-ins between sessions. That same chat is still thriving. Sketches are still being shared. Plans for the next trip are already taking shape. On the last full day, Ian sat us down for a group debrief and opened with this: “And you know what, I’m really proud.” It wasn’t a pep talk. It was a thank-you. Betty Jo said her grandson was going to keep her main painting, and that she was “looking forward to taking skills home.” That phrasing stayed with me.
Final Throughts
What the cruise gave us was seven days in a row of sketching, a teacher who could spot the one habit slowing you down, fifteen other people committing alongside us, and a structure that turned every port into a teaching moment. The composition charts. The evening evaluations. The questions answered against our own pieces. The friendships that lasted past the suntans. The cruise made it possible. The community made it matter.
Ready to learn more?
Our 2027 cruise retreats are open for bookings now. The cruises do something to a group of sketchers that’s hard to describe until you’ve been on one – we’d love to have you with us.
Inside Our First Urban Sketching Cruise
About the Artist
Ian Fennelly focuses on capturing urban spaces and environments by drawing the places where people have been without actually including them.
His process involves layering watercolors, brush pens, and liners to build depth, texture, and detail, allowing them to fully immerse in the scene while adapting to changes in their surroundings.
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