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.

Remember the Japanese folding sketchbook from last year? I filled one side of it with a crowd! I’m planning to finally fill the blank side, and I’m keeping my promise to Carla Silveira and Celeste Vaz Ferreira, who, one year ago, suggested on instagram that I should do one hundred hands next. Thanks for the idea girls!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was one of those weeks when Lisboa becomes a hub for sketchers around the world.

Female models have to convince the brides in the audience that they’ll look as beautiful as the models during their special day. They dash through the runway in their high heels, winking and flirting with the audience, arching their backs in an almost impossible way, still looking as natural as can be.

This is the story of a watercolor that was born old and grew younger and younger as time (and attempts) went.

For the second year in a row, I embraced the Inktober challenge. It was the perfect chance to test drive my brand new Grey Book by German manufacturer Hahnemühle.

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.

In 1808, the invading Napoleon’s Grande Armeé, under the command of Junot, was aiming to take over the town of Vimeiro to establish a maritime supply route through Porto Novo.

Oeste Sketchers made the town of Bombarral their site for the global celebration. It couldn’t have been a better location! Sketchers roamed around the beautifully tiled train station and the peculiar Abel Pereira da Fonseca house during the morning.

These violent opera gouaches, by Wang Yishi’s, date from 1989 and comes from the Kwok On collection. Chinese opera is laden with simbolism, archetypal characters and it’s in the crossroads of several forms of art.

For the second year, the cultural non-profit AIAR, ADC and the Raia Urban Sketchers chapter, held Traço 17 – the Alentejo Drawing Festival, in the imposing Graça fortress, overlooking Elvas.

The agricultural area north of Lisboa is known as região saloia, a term that nowadays in commonly used to refer people in rural areas, but that has a very particular origin