Out now in The Artist

I have a three-page article about drawing with marker pens in the January 2017 edition of The Artist magazine, which has been available since 2 December 2016. Find out more about getting a copy here, or cycle down to your newsagent.

My book Pen and Ink gets reviewed in the same edition. Do they trash it? Get a copy to find out.

Follow me @jameshobbsart.

View from the campus

I've recently started a masters in Library and Information Science at City, University of London, and with a new heap of deadlines to meet and new areas to immerse myself in, finding time to draw has become both more difficult, and more necessary, than ever. Finding new challenges and discovering under-utilised parts of my own brain is fantastically invigorating; the academic environment is an exciting one to find myself in. Long reading lists, hours in the libraries, new technologies and an interesting, diverse cohort have been an introduction to a new world. But it is also a world that reinforces just how much the act of simply putting ink on paper is one that is vital to me.

This drawing isn't a view from the City campus at all – only these words are. The drawing is of Finsbury Park, north London, not far up the road from where I live, and drawn during a break from having my head in books for perhaps too long.

Caneta e Tinta published now

And, perhaps finally, the Portuguese edition of Pen and Ink is also out now, hot on the heels of the Spanish version. It's published in Brazil by Editora GGBrasil. It's also available in English, French and German.

Pen and Ink now in Spanish

Cue the fanfare. Pen and Ink – Dibujo a Tinta – is out now in Spanish, published by Editorial Gustavo Gili. It's available online, and in those lovely local bookshops. (The English edition of Pen and Ink can also be found in a variety of museums and galleries, so look for Dibujo a Tinta there too, just in case.)

Whose work is featured in it? You'll find the full list of 34 artists here.

You can follow me @jameshobbsart.

Out now in Artists & Illustrators

I've written an article about working with pen and ink for the September 2016 issue of Artists & Illustrators (the magazine I edited a little while ago). It's available in the UK and Ireland now.

To buy a copy or find out more, follow this link.

In the colours of Italy

We travelled out to Siena to meet up with elder daughter, who has been inter-railing through Europe. It's a relaxing few days in the sun, swimming in rivers, reading, sitting in town squares, missing the Olympics and wishing our stay was longer. The bottles of ink I had carefully wrapped so they wouldn't spill in the suitcase have been overlooked and left at home so I devote myself to the range of Posca water-based colour pens I have managed not to forget.

The pens encourage experimentation, and because they contain what is in effect acrylic paint, it's possible to layer the colours over each other in ways I haven't tried before. It's a bit hit and miss in places, but it's enjoyable trying them out. As well as the 0.9-1.3mm version, I took the thicker 1.8-2.5mm range, which I've yet to really test.

If the pens dry, as is possible in the Tuscan heat, they can be primed by shaking and pressing them on to rough paper to restore the flow. This means I create rather looser marks at times than I intended but I rather like this effect. In fact, I'd rather like to try out a broader range of their colours.

There are more of my drawings using the pens on Instagram.

A Ford Cortina for Florian Afflerbach

I've had my eye on this 1970 Ford Cortina, which is parked outside a house around the corner, for a while since I heard the dreadful news about Florian Afflerbach. Florian was a German architect involved with the Urban Sketchers movement who was killed in a traffic accident in May aged 35. He made sensitive pencil and watercolour works of cars, among other things. A tribute to him can be found on the Urban Sketchers blog. There's going to be an exhibition of car drawings by Urban Sketchers around the world as a tribute to him at next week's USk symposium in Manchester, and I'm taking this one.

I never met Florian, and didn't know him, but I feel that I got a bit closer to him by sitting on the kerb to draw this. My parents had a Cortina in the 1970s, and just to look closely at this crumbling example took me back. I admire Florian's drawings even more now too; this doesn't look anything like a Ford Cortina.

The house of the Brexiteer

Boris Johnson's house in Islington is on one of my regular cycle routes into the city, and in the brutal political atmosphere of the past few weeks since the dismal vote to leave the European Union, it had often appeared as a backdrop on the news, surrounded by the media, as its Eurosceptic occupant set about his business. By the time I drew it, the circus had moved on, and a last few cameras were disappearing into the back of a van.
Johnson, having betrayed Cameron, was in turn stabbed in the back by his mate Gove, who was stabbed in the front by practically every other Conservative MP, leaving the field open, eventually, for Theresa May to become prime minister. It's been a turbulent time in UK politics, in which all the leading Leave campaigners, having got their way, have left the field.
This is all true as I write, but could be out of date by the end of the day.

New routes

Victoria Embankment Gardens, London

My regular 12-mile daily commute on my bike from Stoke Newington to Vauxhall has adapted over time. Safety rather than speed has always been uppermost in refining my route. I like the backroads and old lanes through the city – with names like Back Hill, Shoe Lane and Tudor Street, and on past the London Eye and Houses of Parliament. The city seems a different kind of place just a street or two off the main routes.

Waterloo Bridge

The biggest change to my route came a few weeks ago with the opening of a new 1.5 mile stretch of segregated cycle lane along the north bank of the Thames from St Paul's to the foot of Big Ben. It meant I could say goodbye to the hazardous crossing of Blackfriars Bridge and having to thread my way past construction work towards the National Theatre and Westminster Bridge. London is hardly a cycling-friendly city even now, but things are improving.

County Hall, St Thomas' Hospital, Waterloo Bridge

The new north bank route meant different views: these drawings show the south side of the river that I used to cycle along until a few weeks ago. My journey was suddenly quicker, and I found I had the chance to stop and draw the views up and down the river in the time I'd saved: the cluster of towers on the South Bank downstream, and the old County Hall, St Thomas' Hospital and Lambeth Palace upstream. In Victoria Embankment Gardens, just across the river from the London Eye, people lingered in the sun after work before going home or heading out for the evening.

Who is in Pen and Ink?

Pen and Ink is, I am happy to say, published now in English (Frances Lincoln), as well as French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. It is available from all the usual places, including museums, your local bookshop and online. It features the work of 34 artists. They are an international lot, from 10 countries, but they all use pen and ink, although often in very different ways.

These are the artists whose works it contains:

Phoebe Atkey, UK www.phoma.co.uk
Cachetejack, Spain www.cachetejack.com
Cynthia Barlow Marrs, UK www.cbarlowmarrs.com
Michelle Cioccoloni, UK www.cioccoloni.blogspot.com
Caroline Didou, France www.cdidou.tumblr.com
Nicholas Di Genova, Canada www.nicholasdigenova.com
Jedidiah Dore, USA inkandsword.com
Rohan Eason, UK www.rohaneason.com
Joan Ramon Farré Burzuri, Spain www.flickr.com/photos/42114709@N05/
Pamela Grace, UK www.pamelagrace.co.uk
Marina Grechanik, Israel www.marinagrechanik.blogspot.co.il
Tyga Helme, UK www.tygahelme.com
Amer Ismail, UK www.tendtotravel.com
Sabine Israel, Germany www.sabine-israel-illustration.com
Nina Johansson, Sweden www.ninajohansson.se
Loui Jover, Australia www.saatchiart.com/louijover
Oscar Julve, Spain www.oscarjulve.com
Eleni Kalorkoti, UK www.elenikalorkoti.com
Fred Kennett, UK www.fredkennett.co.uk
Olivia Kemp, UK www.oliviakemp.co.uk
Ch’ng Kiah Kiean, Malaysia www.kiahkiean.com
Chris Lee, UK www.chrisleedrawing.co.uk
Dalit Leon, UK www.dalitleon.com
Michael Lukyniuk, Canada www.michaelsscroll.blogspot.ca
Fred Lynch, USA www.fredlynch.com
Joe Munro, UK www.joemunro.com
Fraser Scarfe, UK www.fraserscarfe.co.uk
Rolf Schroeter, Germany skizzenblog.rolfschroeter.com
Suhita Shirodkar, USA sketchaway.wordpress.com
Mike Slaton, USA mikeslaton.culturalspot.org/home
Swasky, Spain www.swasky.es
Susan Toplitz, USA www.flickr.com/photos/52358552@N06/
Patrick Vale, USA/UK www.patrickvale.co.uk
Wendy Winfield, UK www.wendywinfield.com
And there are some by me.

We were all saddened to hear the news that Fred Kennett died in May 2016, shortly before the book's publication in English.

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Around Westminster

Home Office, Marsham Street

Two drawings from around Westminster, which were done on a recent gathering of London's Urban Sketchers. Close to the Palace of Westminster there was the usual tourist throng and road closures in preparation for the State Opening of Parliament. A couple of streets back, though, and you could have a street almost to yourself. 

Victoria Tower from Great Peter Street, Westminster

Woodberry Wetlands opens

It's not often a nature reserve opens up near where you live, especially when you live in inner London. The new Woodberry Wetlands – opened last week by the naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough – has been created on a reservoir fed by the New River, which was opened in 1613 to bring fresh water to the growing city from the chalk streams of Hertfordshire. (F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have boated here while staying nearby.) While new housing rises abruptly on the reservoir's north banks, the view south is low-level and misleadingly rural, although there are glimpses of the Shard, Canary Wharf and the Post Office Tower in the distance. It's hardly the countryside – the sound of planes and sirens put a stop to that – but it's a restoring urban escape to greenness, nature and a slower pace.

The reservoir, which is still supplying water to us London's inhabitants, is home to kingfishers, buntings, grebes, snipe, herons, terns and more, as well as dragonflies, butterflies and bats. Some birds migrate thousands of miles to spend the summer here in Hackney, the guide tells his cosmopolitan audience, to murmurs of appreciation. The reservoir was off limits to the public for nearly 200 years: clean water was such a precious commodity at the time it was built, it was fenced off. Now we can follow the volunteer-built trail around its perimeter and stop in its Coalhouse cafe, train the binoculars on the reeds, and enjoy the warmth of summer that has suddenly arrived. And it's just a 17-minute tube journey away from Leicester Square.

Follow me on Instagram: @jameshobbsart

Pen und Ink: published now

My new book Pen and Ink is, I'm happy to say, published now in a German edition by EMF, joining the French edition. The English language edition will be published next month, June 2016, and other translations are anticipated over the coming months. I'll post more news about those nearer the time.

My thanks to the artists who have generously allowed me to use their work in the book.
Q: Who are these artists?
A: This is who they are:

Phoebe Atkey, UK www.phoma.co.uk
Cachetejack, Spain www.cachetejack.com
Cynthia Barlow Marrs, UK www.cbarlowmarrs.com
Michelle Cioccoloni, UK www.cioccoloni.blogspot.com
Caroline Didou, France www.cdidou.tumblr.com
Nicholas Di Genova, Canada www.nicholasdigenova.com
Jedidiah Dore, USA inkandsword.com
Rohan Eason, UK www.rohaneason.com
Joan Ramon Farré Burzuri, Spain www.flickr.com/photos/42114709@N05/
Pamela Grace, UK www.pamelagrace.co.uk
Marina Grechanik, Israel www.marinagrechanik.blogspot.co.il
Tyga Helme, UK www.tygahelme.com
Amer Ismail, UK www.tendtotravel.com
Sabine Israel, Germany www.sabine-israel-illustration.com
Nina Johansson, Sweden www.ninajohansson.se
Loui Jover, Australia www.saatchiart.com/louijover
Òscar Julve, Spain www.oscarjulve.com
Eleni Kalorkoti, UK www.elenikalorkoti.com
Fred Kennett, UK www.fredkennett.co.uk
Olivia Kemp, UK www.oliviakemp.co.uk
Ch’ng Kiah Kiean, Malaysia www.kiahkiean.com
Chris Lee, UK www.chrisleedrawing.co.uk
Dalit Leon, UK www.dalitleon.com
Michael Lukyniuk, Canada www.michaelsscroll.blogspot.ca
Fred Lynch, USA www.fredlynch.com
Joe Munro, UK www.joemunro.com
Fraser Scarfe, UK www.fraserscarfe.co.uk
Rolf Schroeter, Germany skizzenblog.rolfschroeter.com
Suhita Shirodkar, USA sketchaway.wordpress.com
Mike Slaton, USA mikeslaton.culturalspot.org/home
Swasky, Spain www.swasky.es
Susan Toplitz, USA www.flickr.com/photos/52358552@N06/
Patrick Vale, USA/UK www.patrickvale.co.uk
Wendy Winfield, UK www.wendywinfield.com

And there are some drawings by me as well.

You can find out more about buying the German language edition, translated by Annika Loose, here.

A bird's nest in Mayfair

London is a big place, and it's hard to think of it all as home. We all have our parts of town that mean most to us, and for me that's the north and the east, and parts of the centre I know best. So I become a bit of a tourist in places like Mayfair. It's one of the city's richest parts with impressive architecture and plenty of displays of ostentatious wealth, which I usually look at with bemused detachment. Above, though, nature takes its course. It may be an old, empty nest, but it survives in a budding tree just around the corner from the Ritz Hotel (below).

Back to pencils

Derwent Graphic 4B

I drew with pencils (or charcoal) for years before I took up the thick black marker pen. The shift was for a variety of reasons, not least my love for intense blackness and the permanence of ink. But when I was sent a variety of Derwent drawing products recently, it was no hardship to try them out.

There's nothing quite like a pencil. I have written before about why I find them so fantastic: their natural, organic quality, their glorious subtleties of line, their apparent omnipresence (is there a home in the world without at least one, or a shopping street that doesn't sell them?), and their overall honesty (what you see is exactly what you get, and you're not left wondering how long it is before they run out).

Derwent Graphic 8B

The way you work has a big influence on what pencils you may need. I have rarely used the harder pencils from the H end of the scale in Derwent's Graphic set, preferring a 2B, 4B or 6B. Using softer pencils mean they need sharpening more often, if that is important, and that they get worked down more quickly, but this is a small price to pay. It's fun just to pull the point across the surface of the paper: the feel of a pencil on the paper is so nuanced you can sense the texture as the graphite is applied in a way that you never do with the ink of a marker pen.

The Sketching set is a softer, thicker graphite, in HB, 2B and 4B. I think it is only as I am using these that I realise how much I like the point of a pencil. It's the precision – the lack of "sketchiness" – that is appealing about a pencil, just as it is the uniform, relentless directness of a thick black marker pen that I find appealing.

Derwent Sketching 4B

My problems with pencils? They can be more subtle and "sketchy" than I like, and don't always show up strongly when posted on social media. A dropped pencil can mean the graphite shaft is shattered so a sharpened lead is quickly broken, especially with softer pencils (although getting a set in a tin helps to reduce this likelihood). But for all that, pencils are a beautiful thing – my thanks to Derwent for sending them for me to try.

Back at Millennium Mills

London's Urban Sketchers had their second visit to the huge £3.5 billion Silvertown redevelopment site in the old Docklands earlier his month, currently a deserted, windswept wasteland, but within the next ten years or so, we are promised, a booming new high-tech neighbourhood of waterside homes, jobs, shops and leisure. We have been invited to record the changes to the 62-acre site as work continues, although the major building work has yet to begin.

Since our last visit, the changes are, it must be said, not too obvious. But with asbestos removal complete, this time we were able to draw from the 11th-floor roof of Millennium Mills, a cavernous, derelict flour mill on the site that is under restoration. From its roof we could trace the Thames snaking through East London communities on its way to the coast, with the skyline of the city's financial district in the distance to the west.

The place has a gritty charm. It's popular with urban explorers and location managers. From the rooftop we could see police cars and the flames of a burning vehicle on a distant part of the site – surrounded by a film crew. And for all the rubble, nature has a grip: the sound of birdsong rises in between the roar of planes at nearby City Airport.

You can find more about Silvertown and images by the visiting team – (above from the left) Adebanji Alade, me, Jo Dungey, Isabel Carmona, Simon Privett, Simone Menken, Nick Richards and Daniel Lloyd-Morgan – on the London Urban Sketchers blog, and there's more about our first visit here. Our thanks to Silvertown Development for inviting us.

Encre et Stylo: out now

My new book Pen and Ink is published this year, and first out of the blocks is the French edition, Encre et Stylo (Editions Pyramyd), on 11 February. Editions in English, German and Spanish are published later in 2016 – more news here when these come out.

The 208-page book explores the wide variety of approaches that the medium embraces, the range of pens and inks the artists use, and insights into how and why they use them. It includes around 100 images, by international illustrators, artists, urban sketchers and students – some you may know already, some you probably won't.     

Who is in Pen and Ink? Here's a list of the 34 artists who generously agreed to let their images be used. My heartfelt thanks to them all.

Phoebe Atkey, UK www.phoma.co.uk
Cachetejack, Spain www.cachetejack.com
Cynthia Barlow Marrs, UK www.cbarlowmarrs.com
Michelle Cioccoloni, UK www.cioccoloni.blogspot.com
Caroline Didou, France www.cdidou.tumblr.com
Nicholas Di Genova, Canada www.nicholasdigenova.com
Jedidiah Dore, USA inkandsword.com
Rohan Eason, UK www.rohaneason.com
Joan Ramon Farré Burzuri, Spain www.flickr.com/photos/42114709@N05/
Pamela Grace, UK www.pamelagrace.co.uk
Marina Grechanik, Israel www.marinagrechanik.blogspot.co.il
Tyga Helme, UK www.tygahelme.com
Amer Ismail, UK www.tendtotravel.com
Sabine Israel, Germany www.sabine-israel-illustration.com
Nina Johansson, Sweden www.ninajohansson.se
Loui Jover, Australia www.saatchiart.com/louijover
Òscar Julve, Spain www.oscarjulve.com
Eleni Kalorkoti, UK www.elenikalorkoti.com
Fred Kennett, UK www.fredkennett.co.uk
Olivia Kemp, UK www.oliviakemp.co.uk
Ch’ng Kiah Kiean, Malaysia www.kiahkiean.com
Chris Lee, UK www.chrisleedrawing.co.uk
Dalit Leon, UK www.dalitleon.com
Michael Lukyniuk, Canada www.michaelsscroll.blogspot.ca
Fred Lynch, USA www.fredlynch.com
Joe Munro, UK www.joemunro.com
Fraser Scarfe, UK www.fraserscarfe.co.uk
Rolf Schroeter, Germany skizzenblog.rolfschroeter.com
Suhita Shirodkar, USA sketchaway.wordpress.com
Mike Slaton, USA mikeslaton.culturalspot.org/home
Swasky, Spain www.swasky.es
Susan Toplitz, USA www.flickr.com/photos/52358552@N06/
Patrick Vale, USA/UK www.patrickvale.co.uk
Wendy Winfield, UK www.wendywinfield.com

There are some drawings by me as well.

You can order the French edition on Amazon now.

The view from a Welsh window

Here's a view of the cottage in which we stayed over the new year: a good, deep window ledge on the first floor, well-insulated windows, half-finished cake, the Guardian's prize cryptic crossword (also half finished), the strains of BBC Radio 4, and wild acres of rain-drenched Welsh fields across the valley to draw. And time.

Back from the Beacons

We had a quiet few days over the new year in the rural isolation of the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. Isolation is a relative term – it was only a few hours' drive from London along the M4 – but from the window of the converted barn at a sheep farm we were staying in we could see only one distant farmhouse in the broad panorama across the valley. When darkness fell, theirs was the only light we could see. Apart from one night, New Year's Eve, when the clouds drew back to reveal a dazzling range of stars of the kind you never ever see in London, our time there was accompanied by long periods of rain and more rain. The fields oozed under our feet, and torrents ran down the lanes.

The broad window ledge of an upstairs room was an ideal place to perch to draw the scene. Buzzards, or perhaps red kites, sometimes as many as four or five, drifted across the sky. Occasionally, the heights of the distant hills would become blurred by passing clouds. The number of cars passing outside our barn at Tircapel Farm during our entire stay? We didn't see one.

The UK is a small, highly populated country, but its green lungs, such as the Brecon Beacons, remain fantastically unspoiled. And uncrowded, too, at this time of year and in this kind of weather. But with thick stone walls and few, small windows, the barn was a calming refuge.

Happy new year.