How to best represent your Urban Designs
Would you like to have a picture that sells the project? Meet Simone Ridyard: Prolific Art Lecturer and Urban Sketcher
There’s always something magical about seeing everyday sceneries being rendered in sketches and watercolour. The way it makes the sceneries unearthly and out of this world is definitely something many people find astonishing and beautiful. Simone Ridyard is one of the few people who possess the talent to convert cityscapes and everyday urban scenes into stunning works of art.
Simone is an artist based in the United Kingdom, but you might be surprised to find out that being an artist is neither her first nor her “official” profession. She studied architecture at the Canterbury School of Art and practiced as an architect for many years. After that, she explored the world of the academe and now, she is working as a senior lecturer at the Manchester School of Art. Whilst teaching in Singapore a few years ago, she discovered the global sketching community. And when she returned to the UK, she went on to found Urban Sketchers Manchester. She is also a member of the Society of Architectural Illustration or MSAI.
As far as sketching urban scenes and being an artist, Simone has had a very prolific and productive time. Alongside her teaching commitments, she have also taken the time to take on a number of art related projects. She has done some work with the Academy or Urbanism in the UK. She also led a couple of sketch crawls and talked at an event celebrating Gordon Cullen’s anniversary.
In addition to that, she led the 2014 summer school at Tate Liverpool entitled “Drawing the City.” She also went to Paraty, Brazil, where she talked about her work at the 5th Urban Sketchers annual symposium. As of the moment, she is busy working on a commissioned artwork for Disney, which is quite impressive considering the staggering number of talented artists and illustrators the world-renowned company already has under its employ.1
If you think doing stunning urban sketches is the only thing Simone can do, think again. Believe it or not, a book is soon to be published under her name. Simone recently revealed that aside from working on a Disney-commissioned artwork, she is also busy working on a book on architectural sketching.
The book will be published in the United States by North Light Books and RotoVision, which is part of Quarto Books in the UK. She said she was excited about the book because it’s the first one she has authored and it contains some fabulous contributions from the global urban sketching community.2
1 Profile of Simone Ridyard here
2 Ridyard, Simone. Festive Greetings here