Urban Sketchers Sketch Seminar: A celebration of sketching on location

Art has always been a part of my life—when I was growing up, I took oil painting classes, did pastel work and ink drawings, and always enjoyed illustrating my own short stories. But it’s only in the last couple years that I started exploring the idea of sketching on location and capturing the life and energy of the city around me. I’ve started getting involved in Urban Sketchers Chicago, a group that meets monthly around the city to sketch on location.

Drawing on location is an entirely different challenge, one that contains an element of uncertainty. There’s no guarantee that one’s environment will stay the same, especially in a fast-moving urban landscape. So putting pen to paper requires a kind of artistic courage that I’d never had to summon.

Urban Sketchers Chicago hosts Sketch Seminar every June, a weekend-long celebration of sketching on location with sketch crawls, seminars where you can hone your craft, and a closing party. Attendees could sign up for four three-hour seminars over the course of the weekend. I sat at my computer refreshing the screen on registration day in March because I’d heard stories of classes selling out quickly. Fortunately, I got into all my top picks:

• ”Composition Tells The Story”
  Instructors: Brian Wright & Suzala Zahler
  LOVED this class. We headed to Millennium Park and situated ourselves on the steps facing the Crown Fountain—an ideal spot for observing humanity in motion, including joyful toddlers, harried parents, and bemused passing tourists.
  
  Brian and Suzala started the class by showing different approaches to establish perspective on the page, including the Fibonacci sequence and the rule of thirds. Lightbulb moment: the fact that I never thought about any of this before putting pencil to paper explained so much about why some of my drawings could barely be contained by the page and others seemed to lack focus.
  
  Then we did a few breakout sessions of 30-second sketches. Using only warm grey-hued markers, we attempted to define a scene quickly by emphasizing or de-emphasizing shadows and highlights. Since I’m someone who can easily spend half a day inking clusters of tree leaves with painstaking precision, this exercise did not come easily! Suzala saw me struggling—what do you do when the main subject of your drawing has the audacity to get up and leave the park?!—and encouraged me to loosen up, suggesting that I mix and match one person’s head with another’s body. “Wait, you can do that?!” I said, realizing even as I said it how silly it sounded. Freed of my self-imposed rules, I finished the sketch. Later, we did the “throwdown,” the moment at the end of any Urban Sketchers gathering where everyone throws down their sketchbooks and we survey the work as a whole.

• ”Fountain Pen World”
  Instructors: Alex Zonis & MJ Ernst
  When was the last time you tried a completely new art form? It’s probably been 20 years since I experimented with an entirely new medium, and now I’m wondering why I waited so long. Because fountain pens are fun, easy to use, and take up much less space than watercolors. Also, they make me feel like an ancient scribe writing a decree… even if I’m just sketching the lamppost across the street.
  
  All attendees received a square sketchbook with thick paper made for wet media, two fountain pens, a waterbrush, and several ink cartridges. Alex and MJ taught us the basics of loading ink cartridges and preparing ink washes, and then we got to work, sketching each other or the view of Grant Park out the window:
  

• ”Think With Your Hands!”
  Instructor: Jingo de la Rosa
  Sunday kicked off with this energetic class in the Art Institute’s south gardens, a serene respite steps from Michigan Avenue that I somehow always forget about. Jingo encouraged us to try contour line drawings and/or avoid looking at our hands entirely while drawing. Again, this did not come easily! My favorite part of this class was getting to page through Jingo’s sketchbooks. He brought volumes of them to share, all bursting with drawings of state fair food, people catching up at a doughnut shop, and lots of lattes.
  

• ”Capturing Chicago’s Rhythm and Energy”
  Instructor: Lisa Flahive
  We settled in at the corner of Wabash and Van Buren directly under the L tracks. Lisa whips up layered, complex drawings in less than two minutes using fat grey markers to convey movement. She makes it looks easy, but I learned from experience that it is not. I didn’t love my final drawing from this class, but I absolutely adored seeing my fellow attendees’ work. Always fascinating: how a group of people can sit in the exact same spot and produce 20+ entirely different drawings depending on shifts in perspective, scale, or color choices. With the creaking L overhead, street traffic whizzing in front of us, and intermittent groups of people strolling by, we had plenty of options to explore.
  
  Read more: I also wrote about Urban Sketchers in Spanish on Paola Martinez’s blog.