Creating a Story With Gouache | Shinjuku Urban Sketching

My studio today is a quiet back street in Shinjuku, Tokyo — with a little Thai restaurant as my subject. I start with a quick urban sketch, then take it further, turning the sketch into a finished gouache painting. One of the hardest parts of painting a cityscape isn’t the architecture, perspective, or even the painting technique. It’s finding the story within the scene. A successful urban sketch or plein air cityscape isn’t just about painting what you see. It’s about deciding what matters, what to leave out, and how to bring all those little details together into a story. While painting this scene, I honestly thought the painting might be a failure. Something wasn’t quite working. But instead of abandoning it, I went looking for the story hidden in the scene — and eventually found a way to pull everything together. Sometimes the painting only reveals itself once you stop trying to copy the scene and start trying to understand it. #UrbanSketching #GouachePainting #PleinAirPainting #Tokyo #Shinjuku #CityscapePainting #UrbanArt #Sketchbook #PaintingProcess