George Philip Dean

Phil Dean, listed here as George Philip Dean, draws under the name the Shoreditch Sketcher. He is a London artist, illustrator, and teacher of urban sketching. He trained in graphic design at Leeds College of Art. There, the fine artist Laimonis Mierins taught students to draw directly in ink, with no pencil underneath and no safety net under the line. Dean still works that way. He moved from Leeds to London, and that change of streets is what sent him back to drawing. He lives in East London now.

The subject is the building in front of him. He walks with a sketchbook and draws where he can: architecture, the mix of centuries in London, the ordinary pace of the pavement. His own site names sketchbooks from Florence, Paris, San Francisco, and Malaga, kept up as part of a wider urban-sketching circle. In a 2020 conversation with his publisher, Octopus, he singles out Florence for a classical centre that holds together, London for streets that tell several centuries at once, and Cordoba and Malaga for a jumble of old buildings and the people in them. Some days he walks until a scene offers itself. Some days he goes back to a view he noticed on the way to a meeting.

As a boy he drew comic-book heroes. Art college is where he says he learned to look. Life models came with the course. The work that stuck was the later decision to go out and draw buildings instead. Since the move to London he has filled dozens of sketchbooks, a visual journal of places and moments. He tries to draw every day, even when the subject is small. The point he names is the rhythm of looking, not a single famous facade.

He is the author of Tate Sketch Club: Urban Drawing and of Urban Watercolour. Urban Drawing is a set of steps for sketching in a city, from materials to knowing when to stop. Urban Watercolour takes up line and wash, tone, and the space left empty, and keeps the watercolour loose. Octopus records that Urban Drawing was published in partnership with Tate. He has been in the Tate galleries over the years, and he has said it was an honour to be asked to write that book with them. The books teach a method. The method is the same ink line he uses on the street.

When sketching in the street was not possible, he drew from photographs so the daily page continued, and he ran live teaching online. It is not his preferred way. The preferred way is to stand there. He also leads workshops, courses, and drawing events in London, for people who want a looser line. Octopus notes that he runs his own creative agency. The agency is the day around the sketchbook. The picture is the building, drawn in ink, on the spot.