I had heard about the
urban sketching movement through Koosje Koone's
SketchbookSkool klass a few years ago and desperately wanted a local chapter but never managed to find one though I did manage to find one very lovely person to have a coffee with regularly who was also looking through that community.
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| copyright Therese Lawlor |
Thanks to Jelly's wonderful
Open for Art Festival in 2017 I finally discovered Reading's urban sketchers. We have had at least one urban sketchcrawl every month come rain, (snow) or shine and last July we celebrated a year of doing these by taking part in the
Open for Art Festival 2018 where one of our newest members Nichola
wrote about the experience. We applied to become an official chapter but you can still find us listed
on this map thanks to another of our members.
Urban sketching gives you a chance to meet others who are sketching the same location at the same time as you, but in their own style. You're alone but together drawing the world. The best thing about this is it gives people the courage to sketch in the open when strangers may speak to you - somehow, saying it's part of the sketchcrawl makes it ok. Secondly, you meet other people who share tips about equipment, books, other artists and of course experiences. In every meet up there's a new convert to pastels, water-soluble (or not) crayons, and
Sailor Fude pens or discussing paper/sketchbooks (e.g.concertina & use of tinted or brown paper) and where to purchase them. I like the general buzz after having spent a couple of hours doing something for yourself sharing our experiences and excitement. Sometimes people are reticent in sharing their sketchbooks but they find it is a lovely non-judgemental environment. Our
group is on Facebook that you are welcome to request to join but recently we set up on
twitter and
Instagram (no posts yet!) so that it didn't exclude anyone from finding out about us.
I've included photos that a couple of our regular sketchers (and a new member) were happy to share for this post.
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| copyright Mohan Banerji by the River Kennet |
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| copyright Therese Lawlor at Bel and the Dragon using pastels |
Over the past year, we've been in Reading town centre (St Lawrence, Forbury, the Abbey Quarter, St Mary's Butt, Broad Street, Reading Museum, MERL, Blake's Lock and Bel and th
e Dragon, by the river), Sonning, Harris Garden and Wokingham
Revisiting these places at different times or going to new ones is always exciting.
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| copyright Therese Lawlor at MERL |
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| copyright Mohan Banerji at the Reading Hospitium |
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| copyright Therese Lawlor in Forbury Gardens |
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| copyright Therese Lawlor |
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copyright Huma Jehan (sketching the freezing sketchers in Wokingham)
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