Sketching at Lincoln Center - February 8, 2014

Watch the Video of our day

You can watch the video at Vimeo.

(http://vimeo.com/86265772)

The Portrait Party Video

Thanks for sharing your photos and video from last week.

If you want to see a higher quality version of the video:  https://vimeo.com/86116432

Sketching for Saturday February 8th

Logo by Urban Sketcher; David Pradas

This Saturday we're going to be sketching with a theme - 

Welcome to My City.  

Sketchers in Montreal, Sao Paulo, and Girona a will be drawing with the same theme in mind.

David Rubenstein Atrium 

at Lincoln Center

Photo by Jeff Dobbins

Photo by Jeff Dobbins

DETAILS:

What:  We'll be looking to sketch iconic New York City views

Where:  The David Rubenstein Atrium, 61 W 62nd St. NYC

Directions:  By Subway:  M, A, B, C or D trains

When:   Start time:  10 AM (Delayed or Sleeping Late - call Mark)

If can't find us

Call Mark 973-809-9128

Greetings from a newbie

Even though I'd heard about The Urban Sketchers  a while ago, it took me until now to get up the nerve to show up for an outing. Frankly, I was a little intimidated. I was picturing a scene where everyone else would be award-winning illustrators and that I would be cast aside as an amateur. Of course, I needn't have worried. While the group is full of incredibly talented folks, for sure, it didn't take long to discover that there is room for anyone who likes to draw, even the occasional sketcher like me. Mark set the tone with his warm welcome and everyone else was lovely, which made it easy to relax into the day.  

Actually, the excitement that day started even before I arrived on location at the Brooklyn Museum. En route:

Once at the museum, there were so many clusters of people, I had no idea where to find everybody. Luckily, Mark had posted his cell phone number ahead of time, so when I rang, he raised his hand, waved me over to the group, and introduced me to the gang.

We scattered around the museum, found spots that tickled our fancy, drew, then moved on to other spots. It was a fabulous day, drawing and meeting new people: two of my favorite things. 

We all started out on the 4th floor:

From there, several of us took a trip down to Egypt:

I proceeded to get lost inside the Palace of Versailles:

I had such a good time that I came back again for the Portrait Party this past Saturday. 

As Mark and Svetlana both mentioned in their posts, we each took turns posing and then drawing each other in 10 minute spurts. As a first-time model, I can report that posing is not as easy as it looks. When it was my turn, my eyes twitched non-stop for several minutes until I was able to settle down and not focus on the fact that everyone else was focused solely on me.

A few portraits here.  Amazed how much you can accomplish in just 10 minutes. 

Swaminathan

Ben

Lance

Svetlana

Mark, Amy, and Toy hard at work:

Joy, Swaminathan, Amy, Jim, and Svetlana enjoy a down moment in the atrium:

Two takes of Deborah:

Tools of the trade:

For me, the best part was seeing everyone's work laid out all together on the floor; 12 different interpretations of each person, from 12 different vantage points:

To sum up the day, it was a blast! 

(Shout-out to Mark for providing the paper and to Jason for a much-appreciated drawing tip, in response to my gasps of frustration.)

This concludes my first-ever blog post. Glad to have found this inspiring group.

The Portrait Party - February 1, 2014

The portrait party was a lot of fun! Unlike our usual relaxed meet ups, this was structured and timed, and at the end each of us
had 12 drawings. This was the most I did during one day with USk (and a reminder that deadlines are not all too bad),
although it's easier for me to get focused and speed up with a portrait than with a cityscape. The grid that we made of our
drawings was a great idea, too. Lots of thanks to Mark for organizing all this!

Here are my 12 drawings (from left to right, top to bottom): Mark, Shawne, Lance, Swami, Toy, Amy, Jim, Joy, Jason, Ben,
Josiah, and Deborah.

 

During lunch at Le Pain Quotidien I did one more sketch, trying a new set of brush pens which I didn't know how to approach for half a year. It was nice to add another small accomplishment to the sketching day.

The NYC Urban Sketching Portrait Party - February 1, 2014

We met at the IBM Atrium for a Portrait Party.  It was a timed event - ten minutes for each portrait.  The idea was to work fast.  We took turns being the model and sketched one another.

Shawne

Lance

Jim

Svetlana

Jason

Deborah

Four new people joined us.  Toy came from the Philadelphia area.  Swaminathan is visiting New York for the next four months from Chennai, India  Josiah recently moved to New York.  Jason spotted Deborah who was sketching on her own and asked her to join us.

After we were done we arranged the sketches so that each sketcher had a column of all their portraits organized so that when you looked across the rows you saw all the sketches of each person.

Shawne's Palette in a Sketchbook

While we were setting up for the Portrait Party I got into a conversation with Shawne Cooper.  She showed me a really cool trick she uses that builds a watercolor palette right into her sketchbook.

Brilliant!