The workshop I mentioned in my last post, Sketching Your Everyday World, at Flicker Street Studio earlier this month, was about discovering sketching opportunities in our daily lives, keeping our hands and eyes in the practice of sketching, keeping a record of our world, and preparing for "big" sketching opportunities like travel.
I had the students work with two-page layouts because I like the way the full spread can tell a story.
These are the sketches I did in the class.

We all had two Pigma Microns of different sizes, a Faber-Castell Pitt Pen in a light gray, and one colored pencil, to keep it simple. Here's a demo that I did (above), plus some scribbles showing them the differences in the pens.

I asked everyone to keep three things in mind:
1. Drawing to understand/to observe - Taking it slow, getting to know your subject, following contours and looking at shapes, paying attention to relationships.
2. Drawing to record - Drawing to record your world plus drawing to understand create a connection to the thing or person or scene or place you are sketching.
3. Finding/taking advantage of opportunities to sketch - Thinking about times when you can stop what you're doing and pick up your sketchbook - with your morning coffee? while running errands? - and taking advantage of those opportunities.

It was such a fun class! The students were eager and attentive and talked to each other a lot, comparing notes and asking questions. We got a lot out of our two evenings together.

Looking through sketches that I've scanned over the last few months, I couldn't help but notice that the ones I hadn't posted yet are all of these four subjects: plants, people, everyday things, and cars.
I just taught a workshop at Flicker Street Studio called Sketching Your Everyday World, and this is what my everyday world looked like this spring.

The sketch above and the sketch below are from when the cherry trees were blooming along the aptly named Cherry Road. First I wanted to do a warm-up sketch in my regular sketchbook (Stillman & Birn Alpha 8.5x5.5) but I got carried away! It was just too beautiful. But I still had time to do a bigger sketch in my 8x10 Stillman & Birn Alpha (I was on my lunchbreak), so I made a few thumbnails under my "warm-up sketch." I didn't have a whole lot of time for the bigger sketch (below), which I think helped me to keep it simple.