I’ve got quite a lot of everyday sketching to catch up on… and so today I want to share a few sketchbook pages from November! The theme inside my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon was composition and I was particularly keen to discover ways of making my morning local sketches more interesting.

There were a number of concepts that I explored:

• varying intervals (this is a more spontaneous way to think about the rule of thirds),
• diagonals,
• pathways,
• repetition.

One of the things that struck me while I was sketching with Suhita in Poland (see more here) was her dynamic compositions. I tend to focus more on overlapping shapes to create movement and pathways through my sketches but I noticed Suhita uses more diagonals. So I did these thumbnails to explore the ways in which we work differently.

Another thing which I did during November was to move from only doing monochrome work (see this article for more about my monochrome month) to…

… a limited palette with light, mid and dark valued colours. The idea I wanted to explore was how to use these colours without much mixing. I got a little distracted by the composition theme and didn’t explore this concept as much as I wanted. So I hope to return to this challenge later in 2026.

It was such a rewarding month and I enjoyed sharing weekly updates within my Sketching Adventure Community during November and seeing the ways everyone else focused on composition.

We also had a lot of fun during our monthly livestream exploring different possible compositions and the implications for the ‘story’ of a scene of the old city wall in Warsaw. Replay of this livestream and the weekly updates are available to anyone who joins the community – whether for one month or for a yearly subscription (BTW you get two months free when you sign up to the yearly subscription).

Next up… a month focusing on red!