The Most Extraordinary Subject You'll Ever Sketch Is the One You Drive Past Every Day
You probably drove past it this morning. Or walked past it on the way to the shop. The Fish and Chip shop with the satellite dish bolted to the side. The post office with the pillar box and that one bollard that’s been leaning slightly for as long as anyone can remember. The old barn on the corner that nobody really looks at twice.
Spring is here. The light is different now. And your high street has been waiting all winter for you to actually stop and look at it.
So Why Would You Want to Sketch Something Ordinary?
Here’s the thing. When most people think about urban sketching, they picture Barcelona. New York. Edinburgh. Somewhere with a cathedral or a famous bridge. Somewhere that looks impressive in a photograph.
But Ian Fennelly, who has sketched all of those places, says something that catches you off guard when he stands in front of a fish and chip shop in Tattenhall, a small village in Cheshire, England:
This is the most wonderful, wonderful subject, because it's so ordinary.
He means it. Not as a throwaway line, not as some artistic posture. He genuinely gets more excited about a chippy with a union jack hanging off it than you might expect anyone to get about anything, ever.
And when you watch him work, you start to understand why.
Right, So What's a Front Elevation Got to Do With It?
A front elevation is exactly what it sounds like. You stand in front of a building and you draw the front of it. No dramatic angle. No clever perspective. Just you and the face of the building, straight on.
It sounds simple. It is simple. And that’s precisely why it teaches you more than anything else.
When you’re not wrestling with vanishing points and complicated angles, something happens. You start to actually see the building. The shapes of the windows. The way the roofline dips slightly on one side. The drainpipe that runs down between the first and second floor. The colour of the stone where the sun catches it versus where it doesn’t.
It's just about looking.
That’s not him being reductive. That’s the whole point. Front elevation strips away the technical difficulty and leaves you with the thing that actually matters: learning to see what’s in front of you.
He spent six workshops in Tattenhall sketching ordinary buildings, most of them front elevations. Six different structures, each one an ordinary village building, and each one turned into something you’d want to frame and put on your wall. Not because the buildings are spectacular, but because he looked at them properly. And in the High Street Sketch Course, he teaches you how to do the same.
Now the Details. This Is the Really Good Bit.
One of the things that happens when you slow down and look at a building properly is that you start noticing things you’ve walked past a hundred times.
Ian has a particular fondness for the things most people ignore entirely. In Tattenhall, he drew the fish and chip shop, and he spent genuine time on the satellite dish. On the drain pipe. On the small details that make that particular chippy different from every other chippy in the country.
Never, ever, ever miss your drain pipe.
He’s serious about this. Drain pipes, satellite dishes, wonky signs, those little details are the things that tell you this is a real place, not a generic illustration of a building. They’re the story.
And then there are the bollards.
You just can't beat a good bollard. Don't underestimate your bollards.
When you’re sketching the gift shop in Tattenhall, there’s a bollard and a pillar box out front. Most people would skip them. Ian treats them like they’re the most important elements in the whole scene. Because in a way, they are. They’re the things that root the sketch in reality. They tell the viewer: someone stood here. This is a real place. This actually exists.
They don't just jump out at you straight away. You've really got to go looking deeply.
That’s what front elevation does. It forces you to go looking deeply. And once you start, you find things everywhere.
So How Does the Colour Work? The Soup Method.
This is probably the technique that surprises people the most. When Ian paints a front elevation, he doesn’t reach for grey or brown or whatever colour the building actually is. He picks two colours that complement each other and he mixes them together, on the page, into something he calls a soup.
I call it a soup, partly because I think it's a nice word to use, but it's because I keep adding to it.
So you might start with a violet and a burnt sienna. You put them on the paper and you let them mix. They bleed into each other. They create this rich, evolving neutral that has warmth and depth and life in it. And then you keep adding. A bit more violet here. A touch more sienna there. The soup keeps changing, keeps developing, and the result is a surface that has far more character than any flat colour could ever give you.
It’s the same thinking he applies to the old beams on the barn in Tattenhall:
I know they're black, but I don't want to paint them black. Why should I paint them black when I can paint them all these different colours?
That’s a gorgeous bit of creative rebellion. The beams are black. Everyone knows they’re black. But painting them black gives you a flat, dead surface. Painting them with purples and browns and blues gives you something alive.
Life is too short to count beams.
He doesn’t count them. He doesn’t stress about getting the exact number right. He gets the feeling right. The impression. The story of the building, not its census data.
Here's the Thing About Mistakes
One of the things that stops people from sketching, really stops them before they even pick up a pen, is the fear of getting it wrong. Of putting a line in the wrong place. Of making the door too big or the windows wonky or the whole thing lopsided.
Ian’s position on this is very clear:
There's no such thing as mistakes. They're just happy accidents.
And he means it in a practical sense too, not just a philosophical one. When you draw in pen and then rub out the pencil marks underneath:
When you rub out the pencil mark, it just reveals this really like funky drawing underneath that you kind of have no control over.
That funky drawing, the one you didn’t plan, the one that happened by accident, that’s often the thing that gives a sketch its character. Its life. The rough edges, the wobbly lines, the bits that aren’t quite right. Those are the bits that make it yours.
The rough edges, the bits that didn’t go to plan. That’s the good stuff.
So What Are You Actually Doing When You Sketch a Building?
This is the question that changes everything. Because you’re not trying to create a photograph. You’re not trying to replicate reality.
It doesn't look like a photograph. It's not about replicating a photograph.
We're trying to use our hearts, our emotions, to capture your subjective response to the scene.
You’re telling a story. Your story, of standing on that particular street, on that particular day, noticing the things you noticed, feeling whatever you felt.
And the beautiful thing about front elevations, about ordinary high street buildings, is that they’re your stories. You know these places. You’ve walked past them a thousand times. You’ve bought chips there, posted a letter there, glanced at that barn and never given it a second thought.
When you sketch them, you’re not drawing someone else’s famous landmark. You’re drawing your own life. Your own high street. The place where you actually live.
Your Street Is Waiting
Spring is here. The light is longer, the air is warmer, and your high street is out there right now, full of drain pipes and bollards and satellite dishes and wonky beams and stories you haven’t noticed yet.
You don’t need to travel anywhere. You don’t need special talent. You need a pen and a bit of curiosity and the willingness to stand still for a moment and actually look.
Angela, who is 79, put it simply: “Who would have thought at the age of 79 I would learn to sketch.”
Shirley, who is 74, said: “He has opened my world to color and shape and added a spark to my days.”
Ken said: “I have zero artistic talent, but Ian convinced me to try something and I was pleased with my results.”
Debbie said: “I’ve taken several courses where I follow step by step. Unfortunately I haven’t learned anything… With Ian’s course… I’m just so inspired and feel I have improved 200%.”
These are real people. Most of them started exactly where you might be right now: curious, a bit nervous, not sure they had what it takes. They didn’t need talent. They needed someone to show them how to look.
If you’d like to learn how to see your own high street the way Ian sees Tattenhall, the High Street Sketch Course is here.
And if it’s not for you, that’s completely fine. But maybe tomorrow morning, on the way to the store, just stop for a second. Look at it. Really look at it. You might be surprised what you see.
