Serendipity

….or following the trail of bread crumbs around the interwebs.  I’ve had this site up in my browser for a couple days.  I found it from a link on Chandler’s blog  but I can’t find it now.

Anyway, I’ve now read through Candice’s blog, “The Great Affair” about travel and travel sketching. Mostly, I read the latter section.  She also has a sketching separate blog, Serendipity’s Sketchbook.  She follows the Urban Sketchers approach and adheres to the group’s “manifesto”.    Under the section, “My sketching philosophy” I found:

“We live much of our lives today in a digital world, processing information – and places – second-hand through a myriad of screens. While I could merely search online for images of a certain city and sketch it from the comfort of my home, this would be missing the point – indeed, it would be missing the soul of the place, and for two reasons:

Connection – For me, sketching on location is all about connecting with a place. A crucial component of my sketching style is that I write annotations on each sketch, no more than three short sentences which convey details about what is going on around me: the sounds and smells, the snippets of conversations I happen to overhear.

Convergence – What I’ve come to love as much as the sketches themselves are the convergences that occur because of each sketch. Whether painting with a young boy on a sidewalk in Laos or befriending two college students in Vietnam who then invited me to draw with them, encounters continually unfold with people I would otherwise have never met had I not been sketching on location in their city.”

I find it helpful to read about others’ approaches and rationales.  I sometimes am challenged by “just take a photo”.  She explains well my new found (or newly returned-to) interest in sketching a place rather than only photographing it.

I’ve downloaded Cathy Johnson’s recent free handouts on designing Artist’s Journal pages.   They are a teaser for her entire class.  I’m thinking Of doing some of her classes on line.  As much as I like and enjoy Urban Sketching, I also like journaling and nature sketching.

But now, I think I’ll spend time getting caught up on my NPR pod casts.  I need to rest my still-recovering eye.