Travel sketchbook

Quick impression of São Paulo

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…

35 hours in Rio de Janeiro

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…

Summer of Seth

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…

Sketchbook memories from Highway 101 road trip

The number of amazing scenic locations along the Pacific coast between Seattle and San Francisco is too many to count. How do you even start planning a road trip? For our week-long vacation, my wife, Michelle, and I decided to…

Greetings from Minnesota

Seattleites who normally plan mid-winter trips to Palm Springs or Hawaii may have a hard time understanding why I went to Duluth, Minn., of all places, just a week ago. (That’s one of the reasons there’s no Sketcher column in…

Portraits of Santo Domingo

Santo Domingo’s Colonial Zone, home to the oldest European settlement in the Americas, reminded me a lot of my native country of Spain. First you have the churches from the 1500s and whitewashed facades. It’s as if you were strolling…