A Week to Remember!

Okay, so first of all I'm sorry for abandoning you Gentle Reader, for probably the longest break EVER in my blog history. It's been so busy (and so exciting) with so many extraordinary things happening one after the other. There was no time to blog at the time, then afterwards I badly needed to rest.

So here I am, suitably re-charged. Where to begin? Well, after I I put up my exhibition, I stayed in Manchester in student halls for a week, to be with the 500 other sketchers, from all around the globe, who were coming for the Urban Sketchers Symposium. Which meant I had to be in both exhibition and symposium mode simultaneously, the whole time I was there. It was pretty exhausting, but also exhilarating.

I went to some excellent workshops and demonstrations at the symposium, including working with the legendary KK (above) who showed us how to draw with a sharpened stick (yes, really), a lovely relaxing session in the park, drawing trees with Robyn Bauer:

...and sketching the John Ryland's library with none other than Liz Steel. She taught us to think about volume first, to get the structure and 3-dimensionality of a building described, before we get bogged down with detail. 

This was really good for me, as I always get side-tracked by interesting twiddly bits, so quite often can't fit the whole building on the page. Here is Liz, doing a demonstration piece, after which, we all did a 2nd, longer sketch. I didn't get a photo of mine unfortunately, before I donated it to the symposium auction - an annual fundraiser for Urban Sketchers. The symposium team scanned all the donations though, so there's a copy out there, which I'll get once the dust settles, I expect.

One of my favourite pieces from the symposium is this watercolour I did at Castlefield, shortly after my painting workshop with one of the most beautiful watercolourists around, Shari Blaukopf. She focused her session on painting with a limited palette, which really works. This is only 3 colours:

Shari has a new Craftsy class out  by the way. Great stuff. It's really so useful. I recommend it!

During the symposium, I went to lectures too. One on graphic-novel storyboarding, by the urban illustrator Favian Ee; another on teaching non-artists to draw by ethnographer, Karina Kushnir:

Karina's was especially interesting to me, having just taught the Morgan Centre team to sketch and it was interesting how many similar techniques we had devised. I did a couple of beginners workshops along similar lines at my exhibition, with family groups. We had loads of fun and they produced drawings, collages, watercolours - all sorts of  lovely work. I concentrated on demystifying different media and showing people simple but effective this everyone can manage. Here are a couple of pieces from my final session, on the last day of the exhibition:

If anyone is interested, I am now offering these 'empowerment workshops'. At the moment this is just available for ready-made groups in the UK, such as schools, libraries or art clubs, but I am thinking of running a workshop individuals can sign up for next year. Let me know if you want to hear about that, once I've got it together.

I also gave two lectures at the symposium, well, the same lecture twice, about my year as artist-in-residence of course. That went down really well, which was great, especially as it was being filmed (no pressure!). Lis Watkins sketched me strutting my stuff as well:

The film of my lecture will be available in a month or so on my new website (yes, that's another thing to tell you about... next time perhaps). My lecture was the perfect opportunity to plug the exhibition again of course, which was luckily only down the road.

 
The private view of the show was on the Friday night, to coincide with a free evening for the symposium delegates, to make sure lots of people came. That plan worked like a dream. We had a full house. I changed into my best frock and Sue Heath and myself took it in turns to climb up onto the windowsill and say a few words:

Mostly though, I spent the evening being hugged and kissed, signing copies of my Sketching People book and being told how clever I was - how nice is that? Free wine too. Oh yes. Worth all the hard work!

The symposium visitors hung on in Manchester on Sunday and we did yet more sketching (naturally). This sketch was done in the evening, when a small group of us were hanging out at Albert Square, sketching people at the Jazz Festival (which looked more like a beer festival to me, to be honest):

I was especially pleased with this painting that I did sitting quietly on my own on Sunday morning (thanks for those volume tips Liz):

I was pleased to have the company for the rest of that day, as I had to hang on in Manchester until the end of Monday, when we took down the exhibition. Sigh. It felt really sad to dismantle everything I had worked so hard to construct over so many weeks.

So, that's the story of my busy, busy week. There have been more adventures since of course, but they will have to wait until next time.