The Broken Silhouette is the handout from my 2017’s USK workshop in Chicago, emphasizing direct watercolor in urban settings.

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Making Expressive Pen and Ink Drawings on Location: This 11 page self-printable booklet is the class notes and exercises from an Urban Sketchers workshop designed in partnership with the Virginia Center for Architecture. At the time I was thinking about bringing Urban Sketching to an audience of architects – so the underlying goal here is to loosen up line work and to start sketching like a painter. These exercises were originally posted on the blog back in April 2015.

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Tea, Milk, Honey: A Watercolor Sketching Cheat Sheet is a single page, folded booklet, crammed with notes about sketching in watercolor. I made it for my workshop on three pass watercolor sketching at the USk symposim in Paraty Brazil – but – it should be useful as a refresher for any beginners.

Feel free to grab the PDF for yourself, or to hand out to your own students. Just print the file and fold it: in half lengthwise, and in half shortwise – to make a little booklet.

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Drawing People in Motion is a short (7 page) PDF packed with helpful drawing tips and step by step sketches. It was designed as a handout for my class at the 2013 Urban Sketchers symposium in Barcelona.

I recommend reading in iBooks or Acrobat Reader on any tablet or mobile device. Links may not work in the Kindle Reader because Apple and Amazon can’t seem to get along. Of course you can also read PDFs in any web browser.

Enjoy, and let me know if you found it helpful! ~m

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Actors on Stage: Sketching Characters on the Street is the printable PDF version of my class notes for my session at the 2015 USK Symposium in Singapore. This is a quick little class on sketching portraits and ‘slice-of-life’ activities on the street. It’s a collection of simple tips really, but I hope you find it handy. Feel free to try out the approach to sketching people – and use it in your own Urban Sketching outings.

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The Site Sketching Card Deck: is a multiplayer drawing game developed for my workshop at Urban Sketchers 2016 international symposium in Manchester UK.

This project is ideal for art instructors, workshop leaders, or sketching club co-coordinators. Feel free to distribute these files, or pass on the link to this page.

Summary: Typically, at an un-guided sketchcrawl each artist wants to maximize their time drawing, so they sit right down and immediately begin drawing the ‘best view’. An unfortunate side effect is that we often end up with many renditions of the same drawing!

If instead, artists were to be given assignments – specific tasks of what to draw – which are pre-planned to avoid overlap with the work of other artists, the group could insure complete coverage of a site. Nobody would draw the same thing, and together, we would draw everything!

In recognition of the natural tendency for artists to resist outside direction (herding cats?) – and just to add an element of fun :) I propose an automated system of choosing drawing assignments.

No single person will be ‘in charge’ of the project plan – but rather, topics can be assigned by random chance.

In short: a deck of cards.

Click through for a PDF of printable cards, and the rules of the game!

~m