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.
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.
Lisboa Makeup School
Last weekend, the Lisboa Makeup School students had their final course exam. Nine talented girls led by the amazing makeup artist Miguel Molena spent the whole Sunday working their way into the makeup world in a basement of an office building in the central Avenida da Liberdade.
10×10 Lisbon: Local markets = great professions
For my third class as instructor in the Urban Sketchers 10 Years x 10 Classes programme in Lisboa, we went to Campo de Ourique market, a small and cozy building, in an uptown district, that underwent a deep renovation a few years ago, and is now a posh destination to eat and drink in the city.
10×10 Lisbon: Skyscrapers
The challenge was to sketch far and below from a skyscraper. But conventional tall buildings are scarce in this capital city, and not very suitable places to sketch from, so I opted to lead the participants to one of Lisboa’s own alternative skyscrapers – the Nossa Senhora do Monte vantage point.
Tango in Lisboa
For nearly a week, a few hundreds of tango enthusiasts from all over the world stormed the glorious setting of the Voz do Operário great hall to attend the annual International Lisbon Tango Festival.
Lessons from Portimão
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“
10 years x 10 classes
10 years x 10 classes is the first long-term education project organized by Urban Sketchers, celebrating the movement’s 10 year anniversary.