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.

New from Simone and Pete

Two new books have been published in the past few months by artists well known in urban sketching circles, and I have drawings in both of them. Archisketcher by Simone Ridyard and Creative Sketching Workshop by Pete Scully are both published in the UK by Apple. With Katherine Tyrrell's Sketching 365 and my own Sketch Your World, they make up a quartet of drawing books published by Apple that reveal themselves through the similar covers and designs (well done that RotoVision team).

Simone's Archisketcher focuses on the nitty-gritty of urban sketching: architecture. It has drawings by about 40 artists, and I particularly like the way it gets beneath the surface to look at how cities have changed and developed, focuses on different architectural styles, and explores the characters of neighbourhoods well known to particular contributors. It is great to be led through the streets by Simone, who is a Manchester-based architect and senior lecturer — she is playing a central role in the annual Urban Sketchers symposium that heads to that city in July 2016.

Pete Scully is based in Davis, California, but English — we've only met once at a sketchcrawl he organised through the East End. His book, Creative Sketching Workshop, takes the form of a series of workshops by 12 artists who each explore their own approaches to particular themes, such as drawing in bars, making travel portraits or street sketching. Each section starts with a jumping-off point to get you started, followed by a series of examples by the artist. It's a book, like Simone's, that urges us to get out and draw.

They are on sale in the usual places, usually close to Sketch Your World and Sketching 365.

Coming up in 2016: Pen and Ink

I have a new book out in 2016. It's called Pen and Ink, and it's published in the UK by Frances Lincoln in June. Before that, in the new year, it will be published in French and German editions. I'll post more details of these — and other editions — when I have them.

The book features the drawings of around 30 artists (some old favourites, others new discoveries) who, as the title effectively suggests, work with pen and ink. It's a medium that is broad in scope, as are the works that are featured in it. It's available for pre-order now, but I'll post more about it, and the artists featured in it, in time.

My Garden an Amazon Best Book 2015

Good news. Dream Draw Design My Garden has been selected as one of Amazon's Best Books in 2015. It's one of the Editors' Holiday Gift Picks in the Design, Construct, Create section, meaning, I think, that it will make a great Christmas present. Who am I to argue?

There's more about it here. It's available from other online places as well, and your real-life high street book store. (It's just as good wherever you get it.)

St Paul's on a latte cup

My drawing of St Paul's and the city skyline are on the takeaway latte cups of the Timberyard chain of coffee shops for the next few months (while the stocks of 50,000 last). Get a latte, get a drawing.
It coincides with an exhibition of drawings by the London Urban Sketchers group from 2 November to 30 April 2016 at the brand new Timberyard Soho branch (4 Noel Street, London W1F 8GB). I'm showing (and selling) prints of the drawing (below) — email me for details.
I drew the view from Blackfriars Bridge as I cycled home one night after work. I've always liked the way the taller buildings towards the east appear over the top of the solar panelling of the railway station that spans the river: the Barbican towers, St Paul's, Tower 42, Cheesegrater, and a glimpse of the Gherkin pop up. There's another second part of the drawing that continues around to the south, showing the Walkie Talkie, Shard and Tate Modern. I drew it all with my cycle helmet on.
The bridge is the only one in central London that runs directly north-south, so the sunsets viewed from it can be spectacular. (It sounds ridiculous, but close your eyes on the windier days and it's the closest London has to offer to the feeling you get by standing on top of Henna Cliff, Morwenstow. Traffic, planes, sirens, commuters, architecture and everything else apart, that is.) The bridge isn't a friendly place for cyclists, but I like it.

Around Albert Bridge

I joined the London Urban Sketchers sketchcrawl around Battersea the other week — on one side of the Thames is the Norman Foster and Partners-designed Riverside complex, with its curved balconies, all empty despite it being a lovely day, and on the other side the historically burdened Cheyne Walk, festooned with blue plaques behind iron railings.

In Pete Scully's new book

I have a couple of chapters in Pete Scully's great new book, Creative Sketching Workshop, which is published now. (The covers, drawn by Pete here, are for the US and UK editions.) I know Pete through the Urban Sketchers network and through joining him on his sketchcrawl around the East End of London a few years ago when he was back visiting the UK (he now lives in Davis, California). And I'm looking forward to seeing him again later in the year.

There are contributions to the book from other artists I've worked with before, including Virginia Hein, Nina Johansson and Melanie Reim. It's great to be in such good company.

Did you spot the family resemblance of his book and Sketch Your World? That's because they are related, along with Simone Ridyard's Archisketcher, just published, and Katherine Tyrrell's Sketching 365, both of which I also have work in. (We are all published in the UK by Apple Press and in the US by North Light.) I'll blog about Simone's book too when I get my hands on a copy.

Here's a page from my parks and gardens chapter in Creative Sketching Workshop, which is available, like the other books, from discerning bookshops and the usual online places.

Interview: Jackson's art blog

I've been interviewed by Lisa Takahashi for the blog of Jackson's (the art materials suppliers). Surprise, surprise, it's about drawing in sketchbooks. You can find it here.

You can also find an interview there with Róisín Curé, who we met in Ireland last month.

To Ireland's west coast

James Hobbs, Twelve Bens, Connemara, Ireland

We're back from a week in Ireland – last visited by us in the 1980s before the onset of daughters. We headed to the west coast, stayed a few days in Connemara and another few days on the Aran Islands. As part of my research into a new book (full details in time), I took a few bottles of ink (just black, blue and green) and a few brushes, but for all of Ireland's greenness, it was the greys that got me. And the skies, too: always heavy with clouds, always threatening, but rarely delivering.

James Hobbs, Gurteen Beach, County Galway

In Galway we met for tea with urban sketcher Róisín Curé, who lives down the coast and has a fantastic plot to cover. Galway is a livelier place than when we were last there – it is bidding to become European Capital of Culture in 2020. Perhaps that exposure would widen its appeal to UK visitors. If you heard a tourist's voice it would mostly likely have a French, Italian or American accent.

James Hobbs, Connemara coast

What remains entirely unchanged, though, is the friendliness of Ireland. There's a welcome everywhere you go. We won't wait 30 years before we go again.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

From the 32nd floor

I was lucky to be part of a group who were invited to draw from the 32nd storey of an office block in the City of London earlier this month. Compared with buildings in many other cities, the 32nd floor isn't really so high, but in London it gives you a phenomenal view.

It would have been easy just to spend the time gawping at the view and trying to make sense of which parts of town are which, but it's not often you get a chance to draw scenes like these.

Our thanks to Carlos Olvera for inviting us up. We are hoping to arrange another visit soon.

Westminster crumbles

Never mind London Bridge, now the Houses of Parliament are falling down. A recent official report says that it could cost £5.7 billion and take 32 years to renovate it and turn it into the kind of building a modern democracy needs. UNESCO world heritage site it may be, but it is also an outdated, crumbling, rat-infested, leaking, asbestos-ridden gentlemen's club that needs dragging into the 21st century. I've already written about the leaning Big Ben.

It could be that members of parliament and peers are moved out while the restoration work is undertaken, speeding up the process. But where would they go? The Olympic Park media centre in the East End has been suggested as one temporary option. But what about outside London? Getting parliament out of the capital could invigorate its work and help change our jaded attitude to it. What about the city of Manchester, for instance? That would be an excellent choice.

Dream, Draw, Design My Garden is published now

Hello. Dream Draw Design My Garden is published now in the USA. It was chosen as one of Amazon's Best Books of 2015.
The book, the first in Rockport's Dream, Draw, Design series, is a playful, inspirational sketchbook rather than a book to read from cover to cover next to a roaring fire. Each page features an unfinished drawing by me to prompt you creatively through a variety of gardening design ideas.
It's a book to draw in, to stimulate your ideas and imagination towards the goal of realising your ideal garden or backyard.
Draw, paint, doodle in this book.
You can order it online at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Indigo – and your friendly local bookshop. It is published in the UK on 2 July.
Find out more and follow me @jameshobbsart on Instagram and Twitter, and visit my Facebook Author page.

In Hoxton Square

While daughter 2 was doing her thing at the nearby National Centre for Circus Arts, I had some time sitting on the grass in Hoxton Square. I worked near here in the 1990s, before the hipster grip took over, before White Cube had moved in, let alone moved out, before you looked in estate agents' windows and rubbed your eyes. The van in the square isn't usual: work is underway to create TreexOffice, a transparent "tree office" to be built around one of these London planes as part of the Rethinking Parks project. You can book a work space in it up until December. There's more about it here.

Dream, Draw, Design My Garden is coming soon

I'm happy to say that my new book Dream Draw Design My Garden is published by Rockport in the US on 1 June and in the UK on 2 July.

Dream Draw Design My Garden is a hands-on book to draw and experiment in, with each page featuring a drawing by me that offers an inspirational jumping-off point to help you towards realising your ideal garden, back yard or roof terrace. It's an inspirational guide rather than a technical handbook, a place to let loose your imagination, with pages to help you draw your thoughts to reality.  

Visit my Facebook page for more details of Dream Draw Design My Garden – and Sketch Your World, which is now available in six languages.

You can preorder online at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Indigo, Waterstones, WHSmith – and your friendly local bookshop.

And yes, that is my back garden on the cover.

Silvertown's dereliction

London's Urban Sketchers were recently invited to draw Silvertown, a major £3.5 billion regeneration project in east London that will turn the derelict post-industrial wasteland into what aims to be the city's "new creative capital", with 3,000 new homes and 21,000 new jobs. Named after its 19th-century founder Samuel Winkworth Silver, it handled much of the old Empire's exports and imports until the 1960s when containerisation and new docks downstream took over. What remains - monumental, crumbling, windswept, beautiful – is Millennium Mills, once home to Rank Hovis MacDougall and Spillers, and a surviving grain silo. Set by the Thames in a wealth of concrete, graffiti, aircraft noise and wildlife-rich greenery, the site is one of the most exciting places I have ever drawn.

Because work is underway at the 62-acre site – our high visability jackets bore the logo of a asbestos removal company – numbers were limited to eight. Security is tight, and there are dogs on the site. We will be returning as it develops over the years so more regular urban sketchers in London may get a chance to visit it to draw.

Silvertown has been a popular backdrop for films (such as Derek Jarman's The Last of England), music videos (The Smiths, Arctic Monkeys) and TV (Ashes to Ashes). Yet quite why something grim in so many ways is so moving I'm struggling to understand. What is so alluring about urban desolation? London's sights are visible in the distance: Gherkin, Cheesegrater, Dome, Canary Wharf and the cable car. But Silvertown is still the twinkle in the developer's eye. Whatever it becomes, it can never be more lovely than it is now.

Sue Pownall, Evelyn Rowland, Lis Watkins, James Hobbs, Julie Bolus,
Isabelle Laliberté, Olha Pryymak and Nathan Brenville

Our thanks to the Silvertown Partnership for inviting us. 

Across London's rooftops

Towards the Barbican

Here are two drawings from the recent London Urban Sketchers sketchcrawl around St Paul's Cathedral. They are both from the roof terrace of the hideous One New Change shopping centre, right across the road from the cathedral. The complex's redeeming feature, as the developers must have known when they were trying to get permission to build it, is the spacious terrace on the top floor, which has great views across the city. When it costs more than £100 to get a family of four to the top of the Shard, this is an excellent, free but much much lower alternative. The dome of St Paul's seems so close you could touch it.

Towards Tate Modern

From Blackfriars Bridge

My cycling commute homeward takes me north over Blackfriars Bridge, close to Tate Modern. Looking east, Blackfriars railway station has recently been extended to stretch from bank to bank; its solar roof provides half of the station's energy. What I have always enjoyed about this view, from the safely of the cycle lane or during windswept interludes halfway across, is the way just a handful of London's most recognisable buildings poke up from behind the station. From the left come the Barbican towers, St Paul's Cathedral, Tower 42 (the old NatWest tower), the Cheesegrater with the Gherkin almost hidden behind…

…then the curvy lines of the new Walkie Talkie, before a gap for the river Thames beneath us (and the spine of the book), and then the pointy Shard, the brick tower of Tate Modern and finally its ziggurat-esque extension, due to open next year.

Look west, and this bridge is one of the best places to view sunsets in London (weather permitting, terms and conditions apply) – but somehow I like these views to the east just as much.

Millbank: the campaign commences

So the general election campaign is underway, something that was very apparent as I cycled through Westminster yesterday, with helicopters overhead, the prime minister heading off to the palace, and TV crews putting up temporary studios on the green across the road from the Houses of Parliament, one for the BBC, and the other for Sky. Allegra Stratton from BBC2's Newsnight was being filmed at a desk behind me as I drew this. My enthusiasm to keep out of shot meant Big Ben remains barely visible on the right hand side of the drawing.

100 postcards in a box

Gabriel Campanario's hugely successful book The Art of Urban Sketching was published in 2012, and I was lucky enough to have my drawings included in it. Now comes a boxed set of 100 postcards of different images from the book – again including something by me – on sale in the UK from 2 April 2015 (Quarry, £12.99), and already out in the US. It's a great collection of scenes from every continent and 30 countries drawn on location by many of my favourite urban sketchers.
It's a tricky one: are they too good to post to people, or so good that they shouldn't be kept in a box but shared through the post? 

The 1967 Ford Mustang comes fifth

When did I start drawing cars? The 1967 Ford Mustang, above, has just come fifth in a poll of Britain's favourite classic cars – my drawing of it is featured on the website of the survey's findings, which was commissioned by The Car Buying Service. Number one, not surprisingly, went to the Jaguar E-Type (below). My great aunt Nelly lived on Brown's Lane, Coventry, where E-Types were made and test driven, and my brothers and I would sit on her gate and watch them go by when we went to visit her.
Did I vow then to have one when I grew up? No I didn't. Bikes and buses are much more up my street.

Around the Victoria and Albert Museum

London's Urban Sketchers met up to draw in and around the Victoria and Albert Museum on Saturday. It was a great turn-out, helped by springlike weather. I stayed outside to draw for most of it, around South Kensington tube station (above), and across the road from the museum in Thurloe Square (below). The museum's first director, Henry Cole, lived in the house on its corner. It would have been an easy commute for him in the 19th century – easier than now, when crossing four lanes of speeding, outsized 4x4s and tour buses is required.