Lessons from Portimão

Whenever I teach in a sketching workshop I end up teaching myself something in the process. Either I manage to sum up my latest work processes and experiments, drawing some unforeseen wisdom off of it, or I remind myself of practices and techniques I hadn’t used in long.

In mine and Pedro Alves‘ workshop in Portimão last weekend, the sketches I did on Sunday were heavily influenced by the challenges we had laid upon our students on Saturday. Urban Sketchers Algarve and the Municipality of Portimão invited us to teach a full-day workshop, and we decided to give a a test run to a programme that we had prepared before. It’s called “The narratives of architecture and the people that experience it“, a two-chapter workshop that challenged participants to 1) tell a sketched story of a particular piece of architecture in the town center, and 2) tell the story of the relationship of that piece of architecture with the people using it. This had to be accomplished using simple graphical techniques, such as asymmetrical planes, two-point perspective and foreground/background contrasts.

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Framing your story for focus / Enquadramento da história para maior enfoque

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Foreground and background enhancing the story focus in the middleground / Primeiro plano e plano de fundo a destacar a história no plano médio

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Central character in the foreground, people and architecture in the background / A personagem central no primeiro plano, pessoas e arquitectura no plano de fundo

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Keeping the horizon line on the eye level, or on the butt level / Mantendo a linha de horizonte ao nível dos olhos, ou do rabo

A local teacher decided to enroll her class of 15-year old art students in the workshop, and that proved a mighty challenge for Pedro and I! But, hopefully, it was a rewarding challenge for both us and the participants. Pedro led the first chapter, focused on architecture, and I led the second chapter focused on people related to architecture.