The inaugural Urban Sketching Summer Retreat was held at the Madeline Island School of the Arts (MISA) August 16-20, 2021. The gorgeous island in Lake Superior and the historic port town of Bayfield, WI. provided us all with what I call a "target rich environment" of sketching subjects.  Instructors Shari Blaukopf, Paul Heaston, Uma Kelkar and myself had 51 participants attend. They were divided into 4 groups, and each group had a different instructor each day. The  5th and final day was a giant group sketch with everyone together, followed by a big "throw down" where we all ..read more

The pandemic and corresponding restrictions on travel grounded Patti and I for a year (so far), and resulted in the cancellation of our urban sketching workshops in Provence, Tuscany, Santa Fe and more. On the flip side, it has afforded me a fantastic gift of time to get to know our home island of Siesta Key better through almost endless opportunities for exploring and sketching. And as I've said many times, sketching on location can put you on intimate terms with a place like nothing else can. One of my early pieces was this view of the Point of Rocks, the only natural rock formation on Flori ..read more

For the upcoming Urban Sketching Summer Retreat, August 16-20, 2021 at the Madeline Island School of Art, I'll be teaching alongside my friends and world class sketching instructors Shari Blaukopf, Paul Heaston and Uma Kelkar. My session is called, "The Goods: Keys to Lively Travel Sketches." And yes, since I live on a small island off Florida's Gulf Coast, sketching beautiful Madeline Island in Lake Superior will qualify as both urban sketching and travel sketching.  Travel and sketching have been inseparable for me for decades.  More than an avocation or hobby, travel and sket ..read more

From my Skillshare class, "Drawing People and Crowds Made Simple" ; This morning Shawnery Mathis, a participant in one of my Skillshare classes, asked "How do you deal with eye level--where heads go--when you are on a hill? I live in a really hilly area so a lot of my urban sketches would have some sort of hill to deal with."  I get this question occasionally, since I usually teach the "eye level" concept assuming that the artist and most of people and crowd are standing, and that the ground is relatively flat--the kind of scene you'd see in an Italian piazza or this Parisian stree ..read more

Add caption Hi all! Yesterday I released my third and most ambitious online class on Skillshare. It's called "Bring City Scenes to Life: Sketching Cars, Trees and Furnishings." It's a series of short lessons (they average about 9 minutes) that walk you through my approach to sketching passenger cars, trucks and buses, urban trees, and a range of furnishings like street lamps, benches and signs. Then we put them all together in a lively 1-point perspective of a cool street scene with lots of character a real sense of depth.   Learning an approach to sketching these "entourag ..read more

During last week's USkTalks interview with the larger-than-life Rob Sketcherman, I mentioned some designers and artists whose Hong Kong sketches and paintings had inspired me to travel and sketch, and to visit Hong Kong in particular.  No one inspired me more in that regard than architectural designer, artist and illustrator Bon Hui Uy. I became aware of Bon Hui's work by luck in 1983 or so, finding his first published collection of drawings in an architectural bookstore in Dallas. That book, Architectural Drawings and Leisure Sketches, was like no other collection I'd seen ..read more

This is a page from Gordon Cullen's The Concise Townscape, with eye-level sketches illustrating the "sequence of revelations" represented by arrows in the plan graphic at right. It's been exciting to see how our global sketching community has responded to the "Serial Vision" challenge I tossed out at the end of our "USkTalks" interview one week ago.  Coming up with an idea for on-location drawing while we're quarantined inside is a bit of a challenge in itself. So I went back to my landscape architecture education for inspiration. The idea was to create a series of simple drawi ..read more

Hi everyone!  I sincerely hope this finds you well, and finding creative ways to take advantage of the quarantine time we now find on our hands. To fill some of that void here at home, I’ve spent the last few weeks working on a new online sketching class for Skillshare.  I’m happy and excited to let you know that this brand new class, “Travel Sketching Essentials: A Great Sketch in 5 Steps,” went live last night.   This class was a lot of fun to create, and is packed with information. It's designed to take a complex travel sketching subject and dramat ..read more

This is one of the most inspiring short films you'll see, telling the story of rebirth of Texas Hill Country wasteland into verdant grasslands and springs. I worked with and was inspired by Texas rancher and renowned conservationist David Bamberger in the early 1990s, working as a landscape architect and land planning consultant for JJR/inc. The team included non-profit education innovator Julia Jarrell, my JJR partner Dale Sass, and architecture critic David Dillon. By that time many of Bamberger's ideas had already transformed his 5,500-acre Selah ranch into a model for land conservation ..read more

This is one of the most inspiring short films you'll see. I worked with and was inspired by rancher/conservationist David Bamberger in the early 1990s, working as a landscape architect and land planning consultant for JJR/inc. The team included non-profit education innovator Julia Jarrell, my JJR partner Dale Sass, and architecture critic David Dillon. By that time many of Bamberger's ideas had already transformed Selah into a model for land conservation. At 4:20 of this short film, David uses one of the many drawings I created during our extended conversations to illustrate his foundation ..read more