Sketches from Orvieto

I arrived in Italy in June and made my way straight to the beautiful hilltown of Orvieto, north of Rome. Across from my hotel was the amazing duomo, famous for its facade and the horizontal banding inside and out. I went a bit nuts with this sketch, as I only had 1.5 hours till my taxi would arrive, so my pencil and watercolor flew!! (I've added this sketch again at the bottom of the post so that you can click on it and see the detail--same for all these sketches!)

I walked around town and did 5 sketches all in the same day...I was trying out a new sketchbook, the 7"x10" Pentalic AquaJournal--the paper I knew well but the format and size were totally new to me. It occurred to me that I might not have enough pages in the sketchbook to last for 6 weeks of travel, so I decided to do 2 images per page...in the end, it became a format I would repeat everywhere I went, as I loved being able to see sketches side by side.

Below are my 5 sketches from Orvieto (makes me think I should always sketch with jet lag!)  

To the left is my favorite of the sequence sketches, done late in the day in the heat...

For me, Urban Sketching is about capturing my experiences on paper and learning about what I see through the act of drawing and painting...so all these are sketched and painted on location.

 This was the view from my hotel window!

The taxi arrived on time, and I headed off to Civita for the workshop! (Click on the duomo interior sketch to see the detail...)

And suddenly...Italy!!!

Even though I've been preparing for this workshop for about a year, it somehow caught me by surprise when it was time to pack and jet off to Italy! This will be my 5th summer of teaching in Civita, and this year, there will be two, 5-day workshops almost back-to-back!

Most instructors will tell you it's important to arrive early to a new teaching location when possible...to get used to all the variables that change from one place to another: the dryness of the air and how that impacts painting (in Singapore, I remember Gail Wong having to rethink how she would teach her workshop, as the air was so humid that the paint would not dry!), to figure out the colors of a new place (I had a real ah-ha moment when I started using Raw Umber (W&N) in Italy...duh, Umber in UMBRIA!), and to generally warm up your sketching hand before you have to draw on demand for workshop participants (instructors notoriously do their worst work when teaching!)

I arrived in Italy yesterday and challenged myself today to do as much as I could here in the beautiful hill town of Orvieto. I have been here several times before, so I knew my way around...that helped! And it's close to where I'll teach the workshops, which is where I'll head tomorrow. It usually takes me about a week of sketching to get the right "feel" for a place, but as it turns out, today was a good day! 

Spectacular view from my hotel room, this was last
night's moon shining on the famous Duomo,
after all the crowds were gone.

This is the first time I've used this new size (7"x10") of my favorite sketchbook, the Pentalic Aquajournal (descriptions are on my blog). I love this paper, as I can draw in pencil easily on it, and since it is a true 140lb cold press paper, it takes watercolor really well. I was worried I hadn't brought enough paper for 5.5 weeks of sketching, so I had the idea this morning to do four across the spread.

This is the order in which they were done, reading left to right:  1 -- 4 -- 2 -- 3.  I'm super happy with how these turned out individually and collectively, maybe I should sketch with jet lag more often!

I'll be making lots of quick posts on Facebook and Instagram (@stephanieabower), as well as posting images and photos on Flickr...should you want to follow along! Ciao!!

The sketch on the far right was my favorite of the day...I love that yellow sky and
how the paints dried with some texture...

Orvieto Today...

This morning, I arrived in the hilltown of Orvieto by car, thanks to a happy coincidence that Felice, Margarita, and their grandaughter Chiara (from Seattle) were heading to the same place--grazie!

Orvieto is a lovely town, and its crowning glory is the Duomo, famous for its striped stone sides (enough to give me a migraine...), and it's glittering mosaic facade.


I sat and did 3 sketches of it today, two in color--cheating, as most of the church is cropped by a street! When I started, the facade was backlit, and when I needed to paint, there was already light hitting the front...so, it gets a little heavy as I try to add shadows, then adjust the value of the street in front. I think I'll try this again tomorrow.

When I was just about finished, I looked down at my sketch and decided it would be nice to get a picture of me and the sketch in place, heard some english nearby, looked up, and asked the closest person if they would take my photo--amazingly, it happened to be the lovely actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (I had just seen her in a movie with Kevin Costner about two months ago, but did not let on that I recognized her), who very kindly took several shots from different angles, even retaking some after I tied back my wild, crazy-looking-woman-in-Italian-heat hair. If she ever reads this blog, grazie mille!

By late in the day, I sat in the Piazza Republica, ate a slice of pizza, and did a line drawing--I'll have to go back tomorrow evening to paint it, as the light was already gone when I was ready to paint!

Tomorrow, the museums and caves thanks to an all-museum pass from Ben Cameron!
Ciao--