"Vacation" and Revisiting USk Symposiums

I took last week off of work for a much-needed break. Normally if I'm taking a week off of work - or any amount of time, really - I am traveling somewhere. But not during a pandemic. (Sigh.) Instead, I had a week's worth of Saturdays, and it wasn't a trip to Scotland, but it was still pretty nice.
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For the previous week or two I hadn't been sketching much because my head was too much in work, so I was hoping that having a week to myself would help me to sketch more. I think it worked. 

One of the things I had time to do was take a watercolor workshop from Róisín Curé. It was so fun, and helped me to reconnect with watercolor in a way I have been unable to do on my own lately. I highly recommend signing up for one of her workshops!

Having this week to do some leisurely sketching helped me to get to know the format of this 8x10 Stillman & Birn sketchbook. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm not used to using it as an everyday sketchbook. But I am much more comfortable with it now!

Thinking about past vacations and travel sketching made me a little sad, though, so I revisited some travel sketchbooks and copied a few of my sketches. The two on the left, above, are from 2013 when we went to Barcelona to attend the Urban Sketchers Symposium. 

Here's another sketch from my 2013 Barcelona sketchbook, of La Sagrada Familia. That was such a fun day, it was fun to relive it in sketch form.
In my notes here I'm chiding myself for these slightly lazy sketches - it's that they lack a bit of purposefulness, as I was sketching really quickly for no reason (Sagrada Familia isn't going anywhere). But I remembered that I had only been sketching directly with ink on a regular basis for a year. When I attended the previous USk Symposium in Santo Domingo in 2012, I was still primarily using pencils and by the end of that trip had started to use pen more, as well as marker and colored pencils.
It's amazing how much Urban Sketchers has helped me grow as a sketcher, and therefore as an artist and as a teacher, and now as a writer! I'm sad we couldn't all be together for a Symposium this year, but sketching makes me feel better no matter where I am.