St. Mark's Cathedral In Venice By Kwan Yeuk Pang, Watercolor

Chinese artist and avid traveler Kwan Yeuk Pang captures the world around him in a series of spectacular watercolor sketches. His use of desaturated color, restricted palette, and carefully constructed layers of washes work together to create rich, atmospheric scenes. From the bustling streets of Shanghai and Hong Kong, to the ornate cathedrals and cityscapes of Europe, each painting manages to capture a wealth of delicate fleeting moments.

The urban sketching movement invites artists to document their day-to-day with rapid drawings and paintings in journals or sketchbooks. Even though the process is often fast, talented urban sketchers like Pang are able to freeze the moment and amplify its qualities. For example, in one image of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, he uses essentially two colors to construct the scene: a peachy orange for the sky and architectural highlights, and a bluish-purple for the shadows and foreground. Caught in the scene are many tourists and locals, as well as the iconic Venetian pigeons, dotted around the wide paved plaza or taking flight into the cloudy evening sky.