Sketching at Urban Sketching Workshops in Singapore

I really enjoyed attending Urban Sketchers Symposium in Singapore - the energy of people gathering to draw on location is contagious! I appreciate the hospitality shown by local sketchers, and it was fun to meet new sketching friends in addition to meeting familiar sketching friends I met over the last few symposiums.

I've taken some workshops at the Symposium to concentrate on learning to paint as opposed to "drawing with color". In the meantime, I also took workshop taught by Lapin on 180 Degree Sketching to capture the scene as if with a fisheye lens - and it was a lot of fun to think of perspective in an organic way.




Workshop taught by Nina Johansson was about observing and expressing how the light tend to fade from the sky to the ground. This Selegie Arts Centre was part of many shophouses on Prinsep Street. The wedge shape and different colors on the building made it challenging and fun to paint at the same time.

Workshop taught by Shari Blaukopf was about using a big brush to paint in broad strokes. This helps to cover the paper with paint quickly to better capture the moment. This is a view of the National Museum, which is at the same place where Worldwide Sketchcrawl took place. Painting in hot, humid conditions meant that my washes (and paints in my palette) almost never dries completely, so it was hard to add darker colors without it running. I finished adding some dark values at home for this piece.

Workshop taught by Matthew Brehm was about learning to study the color values and making clean watercolor washes. I did many thumbnail sketches at Singapore Management University - this is one of them. Singapore has a bright light that is ideal for seeing the contrast on the buildings very clearly.

While sketches I do at workshops are typically not my personal best, I know what I learned at the workshops will sink in and help me advance my sketching skills - so I did as much sketches as I could in the short amount of free time I had in Singapore. More of those sketches will be posted later as I finish scanning them....