LIVE STREAM – Watercolor exhibition / Exposição de aguarelas
Next saturday, April 18th, at 5pm (GMT+1), I will open my watercolor and sketchbook exhibition, live streaming from my home, on Instagram.
Santa Cruz watercolor process
The merciless ocean of Santa Cruz, Portugal, as seen from the cliffs. I took the reference photo for this piece last summer, during the Santa Cruz International Watercolor Meeting, surrounded by world class watercolorists. But it took half a year to gather the confidence and skill to have a go at it! I invite you to take a look at the video and see what you think.
Journals in the north
Nós e os Cadernos 2, an event in 2017 about sketchbooks organized by Tiago Cruz, was set in the beautiful surroundings of the Parque Natural do Litoral Norte, a natural reserve around the mouth of the Cávado river.
Nós e os Cadernos 2
In the summer of 2017, Tiago Cruz, researcher at CIAC, invited ten sketchbook lovers to Esposende, for a weekend of talks and sketchwalks in the Minho shores, in an event titled Nós e os Cadernos 2.
Vila Berta
Vila Berta, in Graça, became a phenomenon, a few years back, by bringing to the festivities an audience that wasn’t used to partake in them, and by becoming one of the most known hubs of the fest in the city.
Carina goes to the Santos
Carina was lucky to book her time in Lisboa during the Santos, the city festivities. That usually means sketching drunk among heaps of people, ending the night smelling like sweat and grilled sardines – It was a blast of course!
Roasted chicken and Latin America
More than a year has passed since these sketches were done. They’re a month apart and are the records of a great year to be a sketcher in Lisboa. In a partnership with the Lisboa, Capital Ibero-americana da Cultura program and the Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, the Urban Sketchers Portugal was able to bring to the city several sketchers from Portugal, Spain and Latin America for a season of lectures and workshops.
The shapes of an educator
António taught everyone how to distort buildings and streets, and I had the easy job of showing how you can do it with people too!
Relax, sketch and relax
After the trials of a full-day workshop in Portimão, a brief respite is always on the order of the day, for participants and instructors alike. Beer, some relaxed, non-constrained sketching, new acquaintances, new sketching materials, and beer.
Grotesque people and places
There’s something about misshapen sketches that attracts and amuses the eye – take gothic gargoyles and modern caricatures, a child’s ginger bread house or the latest Frank Gehry’s design – grotesque portraits and architecture sketches, when done with care, are fun to make and to look at.
The challenges of night sketching
With our workshop (Pedro Alves and I) coming up in a few weeks, I start to get excited about this night sketching business! It’s really easy, and at the same time really challenging to sketch after hours. The easy aspect of it, and the most pedagogic part about it, is that your palette gets reduced to a couple, three at most, colors.
The stories of public realm objects
The 9th International Urban Sketchers Symposium in Porto is getting closer. Today, participants will get to choose the workshops they’ll be attending in the Summer. In the stories of public realm objects we’ll find out what tales do these ubiquitous everyday objects have to share, and what we can learn from them.
Windmills in Moledo
The mid-western region of Portugal has a lot to be discovered, and Oeste Sketchers are doing a hell of a job with it! Moledo is a small hamlet upon a windy hill, on the road down to coastal Lourinhã.
In the Symposium team of instructors!
The 9th International Urban Sketchers Symposium is building up momentum! Registration passes for participants were released and sold out, correspondents are soon to be selected and, last week, I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of the 36 workshop instructors. Feels good to be in a list of so many talented sketchers and artists I came to admire these past years.
Danse Libre
Rocío is a teacher of Danse Libre in Casa do Brasil, in Lisboa. From this studio in Bairro Alto, she spreads the harmonious form of dance in weekly classes.
Drink and sketch in Elvas
Good booze always gives birth to good conversation and good sketching experiments. This one was done thanks to the tasty craft beer served in Mercato, a relatively recent beer shack in Elvas.
Clouds over Elvas
Some heavy clouds insisted on participating in the 26th sketch meeting of Urban Sketchers Raia in Elvas, so some experimenting with wet-on-rain watercolor was in order.
Light and shadow in Elvas
The small Museum of Sacred Art in Elvas is a meandering sequence of stairways, rooms and corridors – wrapped around the cathedral walls – leading to a couple of precious paintings by 16th century Spanish artist Luis de Morales. Urban Sketchers Raia made it the location for their 26th sketch meeting, seeking shelter from the stabbing cold and the stubborn rain.
The garden sketcher
During our lunchtime, Pedro Alves and I, inadvertently, took Richard Aitken, the garden expert, to one of the least gardeny parts of Lisboa – the densely packed Castle district – for a sketch from above.
Lyon, Brisbane and Lisboa
It was one of those weeks when Lisboa becomes a hub for sketchers around the world.