Our approach
A reason to open the sketchbook.
A drawing can begin with a familiar object, a building on your route or a detail from somewhere new.
HAVELO brings those starting points into three focused guides.
Each explores a different subject while returning to the same useful questions: what do you notice, what will you include and what can you leave out?
The proposed exercises are small invitations to practise. You can repeat a subject, change your viewpoint and compare what you see with what you put on the page.
The collection is currently in development. These previews show its original sample text and intended visual direction.
The three questions
Every exercise comes back to the same three.
Whichever guide you open, the sequence underneath is identical. The subject changes; the questions do not.
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01
What do you notice?
Before the pen moves. The overall shape, the proportion, the one thing that made you stop walking.
Look for longer than feels necessary.
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02
What will you include?
Three features, usually. The ones that would let someone else recognise the place.
Decide on the page, not halfway through.
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03
What can you leave out?
Almost everything else. Quiet areas are a choice, not an unfinished drawing.
Stop while the page still has room to breathe.
The same corner, written out
Everything that was there
“Four storeys, nineteen windows, a drainpipe, two satellite dishes, a bicycle, a bin, shutters on the first floor, brickwork, a cable across the street, a cafe sign, six chairs.”
All true, all visible, and far more than one page can hold. A drawing that tries to include it becomes a list.
And what was kept
Three features and some quiet
“The awning, the rhythm of the windows, the one door that is a different colour. The rest is left as paper.”
Same corner, same five minutes. The second version is recognisable, and it is finished.
Written here to show the method. It is an example, not a record of a particular drawing or a rule about how many details a page should hold.
Scope
What we offer, and what we will not claim.
What this is
Three independent creative concepts
Original exercises written for these guides, built around ordinary subjects and a very small kit: paper or a sketchbook and a drawing pen.
- For adults beginning or returning to observational drawing.
- No architectural training or professional art practice is assumed.
- Room for individual style; nothing here prescribes one.
- Each guide stands alone, and the collection simply gathers all three.
What this is not
No mastery by a given date
Drawing improves with practice at a pace nobody can promise you in advance, so we do not try.
- No mastery in a fixed number of days or pages, and no guaranteed level of skill.
- No therapeutic claims about what drawing will do for you.
- No invented credentials, reviews, ratings, sales counters or urgency.
- Not a validated teaching method: these are creative concepts, and the sequence still has to be tested through real practice.
The notebook section
Every guide ends with your own pages.
An architecture sketchbook, an everyday drawing notebook, a plan for the next outing. They exist because the useful part is the observation you want to try again: the shape you kept missing, the viewpoint that worked, the corner worth a second visit.
That is also why the prompts ask you to repeat subjects rather than finish them. A second drawing of the same cup is not a failure of the first one.
Where the collection stands
In development, and said so on every page.
What has to happen before anything is sold.
The three manuscripts have to be finished and edited, the instructional sequence verified through real practice, the page counts and proposed prices confirmed, and the actual file delivery and seller policies connected. Until then the target lengths and prices are development specifications, never the metadata of a finished PDF.
The guides are digital PDFs. The book mockups illustrate those digital editions: there is no physical shipping, and no drawing tools are included.
HAVELO is a collection in development. Images are illustrative concept imagery, not documented student results or a real instructor’s artwork.