North Cascades (The Book)

cover art

Well, I managed to miss the international USk symposium in Brazil this year. And I've been a no-show at the DFW are sketch crawls too. But I certainly haven't been lounging about in my little hermitage of late.

location sketching began Day 1

This Monday (September 15) the Apple iBooks Store launched the pre-order of my latest enhanced (what Apple calls Multi-Touch) iBook entitled The North Cascades: A Tale of Two Seasons (Spring). The book is 155 pages long and (in addition to text) is chock-full of all sorts of visual goodies from my first stint as Artist-in-Residency with North Cascades National Park: 83 works on paper (including sketches, drawings, and hand-drawn maps), 23 plain air oils, 13 videos, 152 photos, scrolling text sidebars, and numerous journal entries.

If you have access to an iPad, iPod Touch, Mac, or MacBook Pro, I invite you to download the free sample excerpt and see what you think. (The free iBook app that powers all iBooks is currently available only on Apple devices. But I'm hoping that, like iTunes before it, we'll see the release of a Windows-compatable version soon.) Pre-order runs through Oct. 14 and the complete book can be downloaded beginning Oct. 15.

plein air sketching -- sometimes in graphite, sometimes pen & ink, sometimes oils

The North Cascades: A Tale of Two Seasons (Autumn), which documents my second residency at the national park, is already in the works.

Free Sketching Workshops

discussing a shot during location filming for Lesson 3

Urban Sketchers - Texas is a relatively new group and we regularly extend invitations for other Lone Star sketchers to join our growing ranks. There are also a lot of folks out there who are intrigued by sketching but lack the skills (or the confidence) to draw in such a public way. But USK-TX hasn't reached a point where it can offer its own workshops (yet). Fortunately, the folks at the Strathmore Artist Paper company are offering a series of FREE online workshops that focus expressly on developing and sharpening basic drawing skills!

in one of the "bonus" videos we'll be adding watercolor to this pen & ink piece from Lesson 3 

I'll be teaching the first four lessons (beginning March 10 and running through the next three weeks). And we'll be covering everything from line and shape drawing, to tone and volume, to perspective, to portraiture -- with a look at a variety of media and technique options, and a variety of papers, along the way.

testing out one of the papers for Lesson 1

So, if you or someone you know has been intrigued by urban sketching but has held back because of weak skills, I'd like to invite you to join the free workshop (we already have over 600 participants from 6 continents signed up, so you'll have plenty of company)... and then consider joining USK-Texas for an upcoming sketch crawls.

discussing composition in Lesson 1

For more information about the free workshops please visit http://www.strathmoreartist.com/artist-studio/about/ or visit my blog for a behind-the-scenes look at what we'll be covering.

a Line & Shape demonstration for the Lesson 1 Instruction Sheet