Why Sketching the Same Scene Twice Teaches You More Than Moving On
- Blog
- September 10, 2026
- 36 mins
Riomaggiore is the hardest scene we have ever set.
An old Italian town that tumbles down onto the shoreline, jumbled houses stacked on top of each other, rock formations behind, water in front, and a slipway with an arch tucked underneath it. Three completely different subjects in one view. We said all the way through the four weeks that it was going to be tough, and it was.
So here is the thing that surprised us when we went back through the submissions. A lot of you didn’t stop at one.
Two. Three. In one case somewhere around nine or ten. And when we asked what each version had taught them, the answers lined up so neatly that it’s worth laying them out.
Ian has been doing this for years
It’s worth knowing that going back to a scene is something Ian does constantly, and mostly on purpose.
He’s sketched the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro in Lucca five or six times. Portovenere three times. Nelson Street in Liverpool on and off for a decade. Every time he decides he’s finished with a place, and every time he goes back.
What he does when he gets there is the interesting part. He doesn’t look at the old version first. He could pull it up on his phone in about four seconds and he never does, because he doesn’t want to end up drawing the memory of a picture instead of the thing in front of him. Which means every time he lays two of them side by side afterwards, he gets a surprise.
He goes in expecting them to be near enough the same. They never are.
Nelson Street is the clearest example. The first one is mostly brush pen with the colour pushed right back, because at that point he hadn’t worked out how much colour he wanted in his work at all.
A year or so later the colour goes on first, the green lamp and the red lanterns down before any drawing, and everything else gets squeezed in around them.
By the most recent one the colour is doing all the work, muted overall with pops of brightness, and the street runs much further back into the picture.
So you don’t repeat a scene to get the same picture twice. You repeat it to find out what’s changed in you. Yours will do exactly the same thing, and if the four weeks are anything to go by, it takes a lot less than ten years to see it start.
Ian went through all of this properly in a members’ webinar called Sketch It Twice, putting the pairs up on screen side by side, Lucca and Portovenere and Liverpool. It’s in the webinar studio inside Urban Sketch PLUS along with the rest of them.
What follows is what happened when a whole group of you did the same thing in the space of a month. It doesn’t run to a strict timetable and a few people hit these in a different order, but the shape of it is remarkably consistent.
The first one teaches you about scale
Almost without exception, the first attempt was about size. Either the town came out too big for the paper, or too small, and either way something got squeezed.
"1st I thought town was too small and I ended up covering a little more white than I intended. 2nd I experimented with different paints and made the town bigger but made it too big."
"I fixed the scale on the larger one so I could fit more buildings, I made the focal building way too big on the smaller paper."
Melanie went the same way, drawing the town too big on her first and finding she had no white space or water left in the composition. You can read all that as three people making the same mistake. We’d rather you read it as three people finding out something they could only find out by putting it on paper and looking at it.
And the fix isn’t always a bigger sketch. On the live call, Nancy told us she’d worked on A4 and felt hemmed in by it, and that the sad part was she’d had an A3 pad sitting there and chose not to use it.
Ian’s answer to that is the one to take away. You can move up to bigger paper without drawing any bigger.
Keep the drawing exactly the size it already is. All you gain is space around the outside, and that space is where the picture gets to breathe. Another inch on the left and that distant rock formation isn’t cropped. A bit more at the bottom and you can drop the water down and put a few more rocks in the corner before you sign it.
So if the size of the paper is what’s putting you off, that’s the way round it. Same drawing, more room.
The second one teaches you to hold back
This was the big one, and it came up so often that Ian named it as the single biggest takeaway of the whole four weeks.
Nearly everybody went too dark at the tone stage.
"I did a lot better with the scale and white space, but layered on the tombows too thick and dark at the upper levels of the town, so made it look a bit more forbidding than light and bright."
Here’s why it matters, and it isn’t really about the tone stage at all. It’s about what you have left afterwards. If the brush pens have gone down heavy, there’s no light left in the picture for the detail to sit on.
You’ve spent the paper. All that hatching and texture and window work you were looking forward to has nowhere to go.
Which is exactly what Cristina worked out, and she did something clever about it:
"I loved it after the color stage, but realized I would struggle with tone and detail due to the intensity of my watercolor; so I started a new sketch (bottom) with a lighter color stage [...] I kept the window lighter in color so I had space to play with detail."
Space to play with detail. That’s the whole thing in five words.
If your first version went dark, the second one doesn’t need a new technique. It needs less. Ian’s advice on the call was blunt about it.
Don’t do as much as me. Do less. Hold back.
The next one starts to look like yours
This is the part we didn’t expect, and it’s the best argument for going again that we’ve come across.
Once they’d been round once, people stopped copying and started looking.
"On the presketch, I thought there was no way I could do this sketch. The A2 sketch was next, and I felt more confident with being my creative self and not just replicating Ian. I noticed more detail, like there are 5 sets of stairs, a tunnel to the left of the buildings, and a brick wall at the top of the rocks before the grassy part on the left side. These details were not necessarily in Ian's sketch. They are very much my own, which makes me feel more like an original artist, than one just copying what someone else has done."
Five sets of stairs. A tunnel. A brick wall above the rocks. Details she went looking for rather than copied. And notice where in the sequence it happened. On the pre-sketch she thought she couldn’t do it at all.
One sketch later she wasn’t just coping, she was finding things Ian hadn’t drawn.
That’s what repetition actually buys you, and it can arrive sooner than you’d think. The first time, you’re busy getting it down. The next time, the mechanics are handled and you’ve got attention spare, and attention spare is where your own version of a scene comes from.
The same thing happens to Ian in Lucca, and it’s oddly reassuring that it takes him five goes too. In the most recent version of that piazza there are tablecloths all along the bottom, checked ones, and he’s made a real feature of them.
They are almost certainly in every photograph he has ever taken of that square. He reckons that the first few times he sketched it, he didn’t even see them.
His explanation is that once a scene is familiar you’ve got most of it saved.
The shapes, the proportions, where everything sits. You stop spending attention on the basics, which frees you up to look deeper. And deeper is where the tablecloths are. And the five sets of stairs.
And the drawing gets quicker
"I learned that the more I drew the scene, the better I got at it. Also, the Tombow is faster."
Cheryl went pencil on the first, then Tombow on the second and third. That’s two things happening at once. The scene getting familiar, and the tool making her commit rather than rubbing out and starting again.
Trisha put a number on it on the live call. When she started with us, the English Bridge took her four days. Four days of drawing, erasing, redrawing, erasing. Riomaggiore, a considerably harder scene, took her twenty five minutes.
Not because she got faster at drawing lines. Because she stopped negotiating with every one of them.
Knowing when to stop is part of it too
Going again doesn’t mean going again forever, and people were honest about the limit.
Melanie’s third attempt avoided the first two mistakes, but she could still see wonky water, and room for a better composition if she added another level to the town. She left it alone. “I was afraid I would ruin it, so let it be.” Cheryl got as far as starting a fourth and stopped, because she “just could not draw that scene again”, and what she took away from that was simple enough. “There will always be mistakes. You just need to carry on and don’t try to correct them.”
Both of those are good decisions, not failures of nerve. Knowing that the next mark is the one that wrecks it is a skill, and it’s a skill you mostly get by having wrecked a few.
Then there’s Vicki, who is in a category of her own:
"Oh man, I did at least 9 or 10 of Riomaggiore...lost count! [...] finally my last attempt I could live with; I realized I had one drawing left...decided to paint with big sweeping washes of different colors on the upper buildings...it was great practice and I feel more confident doing big washes now, but the cliff was too dark, so that was my journey...phew!!"
One drawing left, so she took the risk she’d been avoiding for nine attempts. That’s what the last sheet of paper does to you.
Try it on your next sketch
You don’t need a four week course or a complicated Italian town. Pick any scene, indoors or out, and do this:
- Sketch it once, the normal way. Don’t try to make it good. You’re gathering information.
- Put the first one away before you start the second. This is Ian’s rule and it matters more than it sounds. If the first version is propped up next to you, you’ll copy it, and you’ll copy the mistakes along with everything else. You want what stayed in your head, not what’s on the paper.
- Sketch it again on bigger paper, keeping the drawing the same size. All that extra space is yours to use at the edges.
- At the tone stage, do about two thirds of what you did last time. Whatever felt right on version one was probably too much.
- Give yourself permission to notice something. A set of steps, a drainpipe, a wall nobody else drew. Put it in. That’s the bit that makes it yours.
Then get them both out and put them side by side. That comparison will teach you more in ten minutes than a month of moving on to new subjects, and if you’re anything like Ian, the gap between them will be bigger than you expected.
Ready to learn more?
The Riomaggiore Four Week Experience has wrapped up, but there is plenty to get into inside the Urban Sketch PLUS members’ area before the next one starts. Monthly training, the full webinar studio, and the monthly critiques that several of the sketchers above said taught them more than a year of working on their own.
The next Four Week Experience lands in November, and PLUS members are automatically enrolled.
Why Sketching the Same Scene Twice Teaches You More Than Moving On
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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