“Breaking news: there are Veterans among us!” When my friend Sean posted that on Facebook this morning, I was immediately reminded that every November 11 in the U.S. is Veterans Day. The holiday honors people who have served in the…
A passerby took some photos of me while I sketched at Avenida Paulista and emailed them to me within hours. How nice is that! That gesture from a complete stranger left me with a great memory of my short passing…
Henry Stinson is a well-known Pacific Northwest figurative painter based in Pullman, WA. Back in April I was teaching a sketching workshop there and I met him by chance at a coffee shop. Truth is, I didn’t know who he…
Miroslav Sasek, a Czech-born artist, was trained as an architect and made a career in children’s literature with books that depict city life around the world. Being an urban sketcher, it’s impossible not to find Sasek’s charming renditions of buildings,…
My handbook on Architecture sketching isn’t out until Oct. 15, but here’s a look at an early copy I received from the nice folks at Quarry Books. I think it looks great! I love how the designers have packaged the book. (A shout-out…
My stay in Rio during my recent trip to Brazil for the Urban Sketching Symposium was very short, just about 35 hours, but quite memorable nonetheless. Here are some moments I recorded in my sketchbook. Exuberant locals strutting down the…
I have a bunch of old Life magazines at home that I’ve been browsing recently in search of inspiration. Whenever I find work that catches my eye, I mark it with a post-it note. Here’s an example: An article written…
Family and friends rarely visit us in Seattle. Most of them live just too far away, either on the East Coast or Spain. But this summer, we hit the jackpot with a special guest. Our nephew Seth, a 19-year-old journalism…
I first heard of a “sinking ship” building in reference to a Seattle parking garage built on a sloping street near the iconic Smith Tower. When you look at it straight on, the building resembles the bow of a ship…
I hardly came up with an original name for my sketching journal. A reader who recently travelled to Melbourne emailed me a photo of a much, much older instance where the word “Sketcher” featured big in newsprint. It shows a…
How do you call a sketch of something that is already a drawing or a painting? A meta sketch? If so, I did some meta-sketching for my latest column.
The sketch doesn’t fit on the page? No worries. That happened to me the other day while I sketched longshore workers at The Port of Seattle. I drew the person quickly first, but made her too big in relation to…