Announcing New Workshop: San Antonio TX in April at The Pearl

GOOD BONES SAN ANTONIO Texas | Perspective + Watercolor Sketching Workshop

April 5-6-7, 2019 |

Good sketches start with Good Bones! In this workshop, you’ll learn the simple steps to set up the foundations of a great architectural sketch in Perspective and Watercolor. How do you start a location sketch? Where is the darn Vanishing Point? Watercolor is too overwhelming!

Held in the amazing historic PEARL DISTRICT along the Riverwalk, this workshop offers 2 full days of instruction. The first day is devoted to learning the fundamentals of on-location perspective through demos and sketching on-site. Day two introduces basic watercolor mixing and techniques. Day 3 is a half day that puts it all together in an open sketch meet up!

GOOD BONES Day 1 | PERSPECTIVE | Friday, April 5 | 9am - 4pm* | Meet in front of Cure

·       Learn perspective basics and a simple step-by-step process to construct an architectural perspective sketch, how to build the sketch in layers.

·       Learn what to look for when sketching perspective on location—how to find your eye level and vanishing points to provide the good bones of any sketch.

·       Learn how to measure proportions and relationships of spatial elements.

GOOD BONES Day 2 | WATERCOLOR | Saturday, April 6 | 9am - 4pm*

·       Introduction to basic watercolor tools and techniques, using a simple palette of colors.

·       Learn how to use watercolor to enhance the sense of architecture and space in your sketches.

·       In the afternoon, put perspective and watercolor together.                                            * One hour break for lunch.

GOOD BONES Day 3 | OPEN SKETCHCRAWL | Sunday, April 7 | 10am – 12:30pm  Anyone can join us!

·       An important half day to cement what you’ve learned, joined by other sketchers.

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GOOD BONES SAN ANTONIO is open to 15 participants with any level of experience, but it’s targeted to sketchers who want to improve their basic sketching and understanding of perspective and watercolor.

Workshop Registration opens SUNDAY, February 3, 2019 at 12noon central time. 

To sign up, contact Stephanie by email at stbower@comcast.net  The first 15 emails will be accepted—first come, first served. A waiting list will be created in case spots open up.

Workshop fee is $230.00 payable by check once you are notified via email of a confirmed spot in the workshop.

Cancellation

In the unforeseen event the workshop is cancelled, all fees will be reimbursed.

If you have to cancel your participation, please contact Stephanie Bower at stbower@comcast.net

     By March 1, all fees reimbursed; By March 14, 50% of fee reimbursed; After March 14, 10% of workshop fee reimbursed.

                                    
A materials supply list and additional information will be emailed to registered participants.

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Workshop Instructor, STEPHANIE BOWER is an award-winning Seattle USA- based architectural illustrator, teacher, author, watercolor painter, and traveling Urban Sketchers correspondent.

Stephanie’s sketching workshops bring together her professional career as an architect and architectural illustrator, her many years of teaching in colleges and universities in NYC and Seattle, and her love of traveling and sketching on location. She was the recipient of the 2013 Gabriel Prize fellowship in Paris and was twice awarded the AIA Dallas KRob delineation competition for Best Travel Sketch.

She is a blog correspondent for the Urban Sketchers www.urbansketchers.org and has taught at the international symposiums in Brazil, Singapore, Manchester UK, Chicago, Taiwan, and Amsterdam 2019, as well as workshops/demos in Australia, Oxford UK, Mumbai, Spain, and an annual workshop in Italy. You can also find her two online classes at www.Bluprint.com.

In addition, Stephanie is the author of the fourth book in the popular Urban Sketching Handbook series, Understanding Perspective and is working on another book due to be published in late 2019. 

For more on Stephanie’s work and workshops, go to www.stephaniebower.com.

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This workshop is in a FABULOUS location! The Pearl District in San Antonio is one of the best urban spaces in the country. Beautiful renovated old buildings, farmer's market, cafes and shops, interesting architecture, all along the glorious San Antonio Riverwalk. I hope you can join me!!

Here they come, 10 Top Sketching Tips

Are you ready?

To jumpstart summer sketching in the northern parts of the world, and because the Urban Sketchers symposium starts in about 3 weeks (so sorry not to see everyone this year, but look for me in Asia in October!), I'm launching a series of 10 posts with my favorite 10 sketching and perspective tips!

I often see lots of the same questions and challenges come up time and again in workshops, so I decided to collect some of my responses into these posts. 

Thanks to my friends Marc Taro Holmes, Liz Steel, and Suhita Shirodkar who did a month(!) of beautiful painting sketches called "Direct to Watercolor", you are my inspiration for this.

And of course, I invite you to sign up for future blog posts.

Thanks for your interest --  I hope you find these helpful!
Stephanie

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...)

Here come more posts...at last!

[by Stephanie Bower, Seattle]  I am finally back in my studio, after over two months of travel mostly for teaching and some for work. Alas, it was pretty much impossible for me to post ot the blog while traveling. Days were packed and often I had little to no internet! I did manage to post some to Instagram, as it loaded on my phone when the blog or Facebook or Flickr would not...so please, I invite you to see my posts on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stephanieabower/

For the fifth summer, I had the wonderful opportunity to teach a workshop in the amazing Italian hilltown of Civita di Bagnoregio. It is a speck of a town, you can walk it from end to end in about 5 minutes, and it is only accessible by a steep foot bridge and thus has no cars. You feel transported back to the Middle Ages, but for all the tourists. Civita is remarkably picturesque, Rick Steves says it is his favorite Italian hilltown.

This year, I taught two workshops back-to-back, and since it was roasting hot, we sketched inside the cool, dark chiesa and worked on really "Understanding Perspective"!  I love the simplicity and scale of this church, and it is filled with interesting relics from the past. There was likely an Etruscan temple on this spot nearly 3000 years ago.


Below is how I teach people to start perspective sketches--I start a sketch like this with what I call drawing the "Shape of the Space". Then I use the eye level line and VP to construct the bones of the sketch. You can see how I draw the entire ellipse to help me draw the arches.

I kept this drawing and colors very simple, letting the openings in the arches recede by painting them a cool blue...painting like an architect to make sure the spaces read.

More sketches will follow, including a dozen or so from Italy, then Holland, then England...and of course, there was Chicago...

Thanks to everyone who participated in the workshops and to The Civita Institute for their support of this opportunity!  Ciao, tutti!

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...

Good Bones and more in Melbourne

After Adelaide, I headed to Melbourne to teach a workshop...location was the University of Melbourne campus, close to the home in North Melbourne of my wonderful host, Angela Williams.  THANK YOU, Angela, for bringing me here and for taking such great care of me! It was such wonderful fun!! 

The weather looked iffy ( I hoped for late summer weather but instead got early fall weather...global climate change makes it impossible to predict!), so I spent a lot of time scoping out locations under cover should it rain. 

Practicing in the Old Quad on campus.

In the end, the Old Quad and the Old Arts Building were perfect locations for our 2 days of workshop and Sunday morning of what turned out to be a HUGE sketchcrawl! It was great to meet so many talented sketchers in Melbourne.

The workshop group was great fun, coming all the way from Perth, Brisbane, outside Melbourne, Canberra...I was so honored that folks traveled to get here!

Another highlight of my time in Melbourne was giving a talk about my work and sketching at the offices of world famous engineers, ARUP. Thanks again to Angela, who has worked here for 10 years and was kind enough to set up this opportunity. We had a large crowd after work, and they stayed until the bitter end!

Here are some of my Melbourne sketches, plus a few photos!

Another warm up sketch before the workshop, in the Old Quad. I used the front arch as a frame,
in my Pentalic sketchbook.

Lovely Meet & Greet the evening before the workshop started!

Our group at the Old Quad!

I love this view of the hardworking group sketching inside the Quad.

Me, doing a demo for the workshop...

 

Day 2, Watercolor at outdoor tables on campus...

Some examples of the many beautiful sketches done by this group! My goal is for them to not draw like me, but to draw in their style but BETTER for having a better understanding of perspective and color.

Very quick sketch while on my way to the ARUP offices to give a lecture. This is the Royal Exhibition Hall...

Great turnout for the Sunday morning open sketch crawl!!!

My sketchcrawl sketch of the Old Arts building Tower.

Thank you sketchers in Melbourne, thanks to the University of Melbourne for allowing us to draw on campus,
and thanks to Angela Williams for being so kind and generous and all her hard work!!

Another Step-by-Step, King Street Station

This past weekend, 15 folks from Canada, Oregon, Eastern Washington, St. Louis, and the Seattle area all joined me at Pike Place Market for an Urban Sketchers workshop I call Good Bones. It was a great group that worked hard! 

Most of the participants were able to join the Seattle Urban Sketchers monthly outing on Sunday, May 15...this is the sequence I sketched on Sunday at King Street Station, Seattle--another post to show the process of creating these views!

Workshop March 4-5-6, a few spots still open!

I do love teaching sketching and feel I'm on something of a mission to teach perspective...as so many people are afraid of it, but really it is SO EASY when you know what to look for!

To that end, I am teaching two workshops here in Seattle. The May workshop promoted through Urban Sketchers is full with a short waiting list, but virtually the same workshop March 4-5-6 is wide open!  So if you are interested, please let me know ASAP! A percentage of your tuition for both workshops will go to UrbanSketchers.org.

The Good Bones workshop teaches one day of perspective basics (you'll learn how to start a sketch, the first lines to put on your paper in three simple steps) and a second day of watercolor basics.  

In the morning, we meet in a classroom at the famous Pike Place Market, and in the afternoon, we apply what we learned by sketching out in the Market!  It seems to work really well.
The third day is technically optional, but it's a great thing to do as it's the day where the perspective linework and the watercolor come together when we sketch at the lovely King Street train station in the International District here in Seattle. Then, we can go for lunch at Uwajimaya!

Cost of the workshop is $200--and it looks like I'm buying everyone my favorite sketchbook, the Pentalic Aqua Journal...a party favor!

If you are interested in joining the workshop, please contact me asap at stbower@comcast.net.

And I will be teaching in Italy this summer (that workshop is full) and in Manchester at the USk symposium, a workshop called "Soaring Spaces" that encourages you to Look Up!! Symposium workshops should be posted very soon...

THANK YOU!!

Workshops Schedule -- 5 Opportunities to Learn!

’Tis the season to start planning sketching workshops!  And because all good sketches start with a good foundation, these workshops I offer are called “Good Bones”!

I’m so thrilled to add that my book, the fourth in the series, The Urban Sketching Handbook: Understanding Perspective is already available for pre-sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Here is the schedule for upcoming workshops through June.

If you are interested in joining any of these workshops, please contact me ASAP by email 

stbower@comcast.net to hold your spot!!

SEATTLE (3)

Pike Place Market workshops in Seattle:

March 4 -  5 + March 6 (1/2 day):  Good Bones | Perspective & Watercolor

This workshop devotes one day to learning perspective, a second day to watercolor basics, 

and a third 1/2 day to put it all together when sketching on location.

Days 1 and 2, we spend the morning working from PowerPoint lessons in a classroom at the Pike Place Market, then apply this to sketching on location in the afternoon. Sunday is a half day, when we’ll sketch and paint at the lovely restored King Street Station in Seattle.

Cost: $200, maximum 15 participants

April 9, Saturday: Good Bones | Watercolor

This one-day workshop focuses on the use of Watercolor in architectural sketching—materials, mixing colors with a simple palette, and quick techniques. We’ll look at lessons via PowerPoint in the classroom early in the day, then sketch on location in the colorful Market in the afternoon. There is nothing like watching someone paint in person for learning how!

Cost: $100, maximum 12 participants

May 13 -14 + May 15 (1/2 day): Urban Sketchers Workshop, Good Bones | Perspective & Watercolor

This workshop is offered in together with Urban Sketchers. 

Friday is devoted to learning perspective, Saturday to watercolor basics. We spend the morning working from PowerPoint lessons in a classroom at the Pike Place Market, then apply this to sketching on location downtown in the afternoon.

Sunday is an opportunity to put it all together as we join the monthly Seattle Urban Sketchers sketchcrawl from 10-1pm.

Cost: $200, maximum 15 participants

ITALY

June 24 - 30:  DRAW CIVITA 2016 in Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy 

5 days of immersive instruction in architectural perspective and watercolor in an amazing hill town north of Rome.

There are only 1-2 spots still available! Maximum 7-8 participants.

More information can be found on www.stephaniebower.com

ONLINE Sketching class:

Filmed this past August in Denver for Craftsy, “Perspective for Sketchers” is an inexpensive online course that you can view any time, from any device, as often as you want.  State-of-the-art filming and approach, albeit a little on the cute side :), Craftsy has tapped into Urban Sketchers instructors and offers several really great classes on sketching. To join the over 2000 (!) other participants worldwide in my course, please use this link for a course discount:  Perspective for Sketchers

Thanks for your interest in Sketching!  And please pass this info on to anyone who might be interested!

DRAW CIVITA 2016, perspective sketching workshop in Italy!

Whew!

I just finished a slew of back-to-back work and book deadlines and now find myself happily thinking about sketching again.  I'm already planning for next year's Urban Sketchers symposium in Manchester, England...but before that is what will be the fourth annual

DRAW CIVITA 2016... June 24-30, 2016

This is an amazing 5+ day intensive perspective sketching and watercolor workshop, set in one of the most incredible places on the planet, Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy.  

Civita has recently been featured in The New York Times and also on the PBS Newshour here in the US.  Travel guru Rick Steves writes that it is his favorite Italian hilltown, and for good reason...amazing views, medieval stone buildings and streets, great food...and well, it's Italy!

I'll be posting images and more info about the workshop in the next few weeks.  For more information, click here Draw Civita 2016.

Only 4-5 spots are open, so let me know ASAP if you are interested.  Ciao!