About Downtown Sketcher
Capturing the character of your favourite city corners
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Downtown Sketcher is a Canadian art brand built on original handmade marker sketches of cities, towns, and landmarks across Canada and beyond. Every product in the range (from fine art prints to greeting cards, totes, magnets, coasters, mini luxury puzzles, and postcards) begins as a single original sketch drawn by hand. |
The Artist: Wynand van Niekerk
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Wynand has been looking for the right angle his whole life. His creative journey really started as a photographer, walking streetscapes and storefronts and looking for what a location says before anyone walks through the door. A storefront is not just a facade. It is a conversation between the business and the street: the colour of the planter at the entrance, the arrangement of items in the window, the wear on the step. All of it tells you something about the person running the business, the neighbourhood it sits in, and the kind of customer it is quietly waiting for. Sketching began when he found that photography could document a location but could not hold what it felt like to stand in it. A particular video on how to capture storefronts using alcohol-based markers got his attention, and something in the approach clicked. He had been drawing most of his life, and the process aligned with how he already thought about buildings. Self-taught, he was committed to the process and willing to develop his own way of seeing it through. |
"I sketch what stops me. It might be a building everyone walks past without looking at, or a storefront doing something interesting in the window, or a location where the light arrives at just the right angle at four in the afternoon. Every location has a story. I am just trying to find the version of it that most people haven't stopped to see yet."
Wynand van Niekerk
Each sketch begins with careful observation of a real location. The process moves in layers: fine liner first for the structure and line, then Copic and Winsor and Newton alcohol-based markers for colour, then acrylic markers for the finish. The alcohol markers are the defining step. They are the kind of markers architects use. Colours blend on contact, creating new tones that were not in the original palette, which is why a Downtown Sketcher piece often looks closer to a watercolour painting than a technical drawing. Every sketch is original, handmade, and signed, never AI-generated.
Where We Are
Downtown Sketcher holds a permanent Saturday presence at the Halifax Seaport Farmers Market in Halifax, and regularly participates in markets, trade shows, and community events across Nova Scotia and beyond.
The work is available online through the Downtown Sketcher store, and through wholesale stockists across Canada, including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Pier 21 Museum, and Hudson at Halifax Stanfield Airport.
Featured: The Royale Canadian Artist Collection
In August 2026, Wynand was selected as one of five Canadian artists to contribute original work to the Royale Canadian Artist Collection, a national limited-edition series celebrating what home looks like across the country.
He contributed two Nova Scotia sketches. The Halifax Public Gardens: a Victorian escape in the heart of downtown, where the paths wind, the pond reflects, and the pace of the city slows down for a minute. And Peggy's Cove: the fishing village wrapped around its lighthouse, with granite rock, salt air, and a rhythm that hasn't changed.
Both sketches were created using the collection's shared warm autumn palette, connecting Wynand's view of home to every other artist's view of theirs.
The Collection
Downtown Sketcher sketches live across Canada. From the Halifax waterfront to Peggy's Cove and Lunenburg along the South Shore, up to Quebec City and Montreal, west to Toronto and Ottawa, all the way to Banff, Victoria, and Vancouver. The collection grows city by city. There is always more to draw than there is time to draw it.
Follow the Work
Wynand shares the process on Instagram: the walk to find the right angle, the foreground that changed the sketch, the building everyone else walks past.
@downtownsketcher (sketching) | @storefrontsnovascotia (storefronts across Nova Scotia)