Its Paraty Time! Sign ups begin Monday, March 31st!

2014 USk Symposium registration announcement If you subscribed to our Barcelona Symposium Mailing List last year but never registered for our regular mailing list or our Paraty Symposium mailing list, you may have missed this announcement. Registration for this year's Symposium in Paraty, Brasil, opens Monday, March 31, at 4:00 PM GMT*. At that time, details about how to register will be posted at http://paraty2014.urbansketchers.org/registration. This year we will accommodate more sketchers than ever by providing several passes for different levels of participation. Are you interested in the full learning and social experience of the Symposium? Register for the Workshops pass and with your $395 registration you will have access to the full educational event, including workshops and activities, as well as social encounters such as the nightly Drink & Draw. Are you interested only in the social experience of the Symposium? Register for the Sketching pass and have a leisurely experience sketching with others and meeting old and new friends. Your $40 registration will get you a badge, access to all sketch crawls (two a day!), and access to the opening and closing receptions and the Drink & Draw. Or are you looking for an experience that is a little bit of both of these? A social time with a little bit of learning? An educational time without the commitment of the full workshop schedule? Register for the Activities pass and your $195 gets you access to a variety of lectures, demonstrations, and activities such as sketching tours, portrait exchanges and critiques. It also gives you time for more open sketch crawls, as well as access to the receptions and the Drink & Draw. For complete information about the Symposium, including Schedule, Programming and Faculty, visit http://paraty2014.urbansketchers.org. Don’t wait to register! Space is limited for Workshops and Activities passes, but not for the Sketching pass. Hope to see you in Paraty! For more information contact symposium@urbansketchers.org (*To find out the equivalent time in your city, use this Time Converter.)

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Join Us Saturday in Fort Worth!

USk Texas SketchCrawl: This Saturday (3/22) from 2:30-5pm. This month we'll meet in downtown Fort Worth at the foot of Main Street in front of the Convention Center (Main at 9th Street).  It’s a great setting, surrounded with sketch subjects like Main Street itself, the Flatiron Building, the new Kennedy memorial, the comings and goings at the Intermodal station, and various forms of Saturday street life shenanigans. We will meet and chat briefly, then disperse to sketch singly, in pairs or groups as you wish.  We’ll reconvene at the General Worth Square at 4:30pm to share sketchbooks and for a group photo, then adjourn for downtown fun on your own.  Hope to see you there!  Questions?  Ask jim@townscape.com

Red Tail landed in my sketchbook.

Spring Break has come and gone. The family and I took a week long road trip to lovely Savannah GA. Why oh why didn't I know about SCAD art school when I was headed off to college so long ago. Savannah is crawling with art students. On our return drive we stopped in Mobile, Alabama at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park. They have a submarine, which we were able to walk through. I can't imagine living in such close quarters with a large group of people. Thanks Vets!!
While the guys toured the USS Alabama, I took a break to sketch this P-51D Mustang. It is the kind of airplane flown by the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tail Angels, during WWII.
The grounds of the museum are full of aircraft, tanks, helicopters and many interesting displays. It is enough to fill pages and pages of a sketch book. I was lucky to fill these two.

A Trip to the Houston Livestock Show

They've just extended the rail line within blocks of my house, so I decided to ride the rail down to the livestock show and save the traffic and parking hassle.

It also gave me the chance to draw while I rode. Already I like this plan.

The main thing with drawing in the livestock show is avoiding the hordes of small kids on school trips to see the animals. Of course it's also spring break so there were families there as well. And everyone wanted to watch the chicks hatch. The chicks and the toddlers were equally excitable and hard to capture but I got a few good ones.

And a nice lady captured ME trying to sketch the chicks. The biggest ones were about ten weeks, the little guy by the egg on the far right was born this morning.

I always love a trip to the birthing center to see the new lambs. Mostly the sheep hate the crowds, but  this mom seemed very Zen about the whole thing. 

And I also love looking in on the pigs. This Red Duroc was out cold. Yes, that's his tongue lolling out of his mouth.

There's a lot to draw just at the livestock show: the carnival, the food venues, the booths the judging rings. You could go back every day and never capture it all. A relaxing train trip home made it a great day.