Sophie Peanut’s style is colorful, vibrant and expressive, qualities which can best be seen in her Urban Sketching Portfolio. Drawing in a living, shifting environment means that she must choose to show an atmosphere or a relationship between two characters instead of detailing her surroundings. She does a wonderful job of capturing the fast-moving life in the city by keeping her style simple and undemanding, allowing the raw expression of her fast sketches to live on the page without much tampering after the scene has been captured. The one obvious drawback to this approach is the fact that these drawings are full of mistakes, ones she would not have made were she not rushing, such as illogical perspective or odd anatomy. However, these mistakes do not take away value form her sketches, but they actually add to their charm. The moments she captured feel more real that photographs because we not only see an impartial view of a scene, but we can also see her perspective or state of mind in those brief moments. Through her urban sketches, Sophie allows us to see what her world was like at that moment in time and space. No wonder her Urban Sketching community’s motto is “See the world, one drawing at the time”.

Though both Lucy Austin and Beatrix Potter use watercolor in their sketches, their approaches and focus could not be more different. Lucy Austin, a contemporary painter and printmaker, creates bold, geometrical sketches focused on conveying a state of mind and capturing and interesting form. Her color palettes are simple, and her technique relies on many layers of texture. Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, was a twentieth century naturalist and illustrator. Her works convey both her careful observation of nature (especially concerning plants and animals) and her charming re-imagining of that which she has observed. Her technique tends to be of a much lighter touch, especially in her children’s illustrations. The colors are soft and watery and the outlines are delicate.

Christoph Niemann and Saul Steinberg are unmistakably similar artists in the way they use objects. The thing that separates their artistic styles the most is they way they chose to express themselves using the most modern materials available to them.

Steinberg was an illustrator in a post-WWII world, whereas Niemann is a contemporary illustrator. Steinberg used objects in a variety of ways, including installation artwork and collage. He would glue objects (mostly paper cut-outs) to paper and draw his cartoon around them. Some of his illustrations are political and some are simply humorous.

Christoph Niemann has a different approach. When he uses objects, they tend to serve as some sort of optical illusion (like the headphones resembling a gorilla’s face) or are put under a different light to serve a new purpose (like the playing card which becomes a rug). But where Steinberg needed to draw his illustrations on real objects (like with the girl in the bathtub) Niemann has the digital medium available to him. One of his techniques is drawing over his photographs digitally in order to introduce new characters. Another technique is using photography to capture a object from a specific angle so that is completes an image which he has drawn around said object (like the girl with the paintbrush skirt).