Exciting things are happening! I was so inspired by my Berlin stay and meeting the Berlin Urban Sketchers, that I vowed to finally take some steps to find and meet other urban sketchers upon my return to Vancouver.
First of all, I applied for a separate Vancouver Urban Sketchers blog by finding a few other urban sketchers from Vancouver at urbansketchers.org where I am also a member. There were only about 5 of them, and they were all enthusiastic about applying to get a blog set up by the mothership, urbansketchers.org. We submitted an application and the main committee will decide very soon whether we in Vancouver are pumped enough to do this 😉
But meanwhile, I want to get the word out to more people about urban sketching and hopefully find even more sketchers who might want to share their work in this upcoming Vancouver-only urban sketching blog. So on February 17th, I started a Meetup Group to gather the urban sketchers of Vancouver together. It’s only been two weeks, but 53 people have already signed up for my new group, and today about a dozen of them came out to meet for a sketching session that I set up at the Vancouver Pacific Central Station. I was amazed that all these nice people showed up and were eager to sketch together! I finally got to meet Don who has been my Flickr friend for a few years and sketch with him. Check out Don’s sketching blog. At the end we all met up again to show each other our sketches and then called it a day.
Another boost for the urban sketching community may come from a conference of BC Landscape Architects in late April, where I’ve been asked to present a workshop on urban sketching together with Matthew, a Victoria-based urban sketcher. Landscape architects are likely to be drawing frequently anyway and with all their knowledge of drawing, plants, and architecture could be very enriching to us other urban sketchers. So my not-so-secret hope is that they will have so much fun at our upcoming workshop that they will get hooked on this activity and show up for future sketching sessions in droves.
I feel like I am spreading a new religion, but no worries, it’s just urban sketching. I swear it on my moleskine.
Glad to hear you’re back and have your proselytizing hat on! I followed your link to the MeetUp and bookmarked it. I might drive up from Seattle sometime to join you. I’ll watch for the official USK blog and then follow it. I met Don at the USK workshop in Portland. Ya know, there is a USK workshop coming up in Seattle in May. Gail and Frank are fantastic.
Hi Kate! Would be great to meet you sometime up here, for a Meetup or anytime – just let me know. I will also let you know next time I head to Seattle. I know about the workshop in May, and would love to attend, but I already had other plans as it’s a long weekend up here (Victoria Day).