Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Sketchcrawl

Last weekend, on saturday the 22nd, was a worldwide sketchcrawl day. For those of you who don't know what this is check out sketchcrawl.com. On this day people gather to draw together. My friend Monk and her friend Loes were brave enough to organize a Dutch version of this phenomenon and they did it in the city of Gouda. They put in a lot of effort and with no budget whatsoever got a lot of people involved and made it into a great succes.

It was an absolutely wonderful day! I spent the day with three people I had never met before and we just sketched, sketched and sketched some more. One of them even invited the rest of us at her beautiful home in Gouda. It was such fun and such a wonderful atmosphere, I will hold it dear for a long time to come.

Dozens of people participated and it was great to walk the city and encounter people sketching all over the place. It was also a great day to ask other people about their journals and sketchbooks without feeling like an intruder. It was lovely to see how different people draw differently. Some are so meticulous and others like fast gesturelike drawings. But each was so talented in their own way.

So here are some of my pages. I'm not showing you all of them, because some have personal information on them from other participants and I don't want to invade their privacy too much. All were done in my heart journal.

I started out simple with some very small drawings in between some pasted in business cards. The stamps on the top right and bottom left were made by my friend Monk from erasers. Are they cool or what?


Then I started sketching people who came to the meeting point at the Agnietenkapel. It's hard to sketch people who are moving so much. I'm a slow sketcher, so I need more time then they give me ;-)



Then four of us went outside to walk the city and start sketching the beautiful buildings. This is the top of the library of Gouda. Again I did not have enough time to finish it properly. I guess buildings are hard too ;-)


It was quite cold outside so we were very grateful to be invited into the house of one of us. This is the view from the window of her house.


Sketching and walking around makes you hungry so we had lunch at the museum. On the table there were these pretty flowers and a little blackboard in the form of a teapot. It's the only sketch I colored in afterwards (with watercolor).

After we warmed up it was back into the cold where we sat in the museum's garden to draw the pretty things around there. I drew a plaque that was affixed to the gate of the museum. There were two very grumpy old ladies on it.

Fortunately there were also some beautiful young ladies to draw in the form of classical statues. As I state in the text I wrote to the side: it's way easier to draw a statue than a living person. Statues know how to keep perfectly still!

For those of you who are interested in seeing more pictures from the sketchcrawl  in Gouda and also photographs, there is a flickr group and a blog devoted to it. Go check them out!