Urban sketching - workshops and a travel kit

I have always been fascinated by artists who draw and paint plein air. Whenever I see one, I stop to peek at their sketchbooks and marvel at their skill. It has been a particular daydream of mine - to sketch at quaint little cafes, or by the beach, or on vacation. To bring home a sketchbook full of memories! Wouldn't that be sweet?

I found this group called Urban Sketchers who meet regularly to sketch and paint on location. And this year, in celebration of their 10 year anniversary they are conducting 10 workshops in their various chapters, including the Bay Area chapter. I signed up for 5 of those workshops. And now I am bubbling over with excitement!!

Sketching out and about requires some planning. So I gathered up all my art supplies (including a few that I bought specifically for the workshop) and shortlisted what I would like to carry through a day of walking and sketching. The criteria was that it had to fulfill all my sketching needs, while at the same time be light enough to carry around for hours. Here is what I am finally planning to pack for the workshops:

My travel sketching kit

• Sketchbook: Based on inputs from my workshop instructors, I chose the Canson mixed media 5.5X8.5 sketchbook. It has spiral binding and a hardbound cover, and pages can be folded back for ease of holding with one hand. This sketchbook comes with 224 gsm paper weight which is pretty good for simple watercolor washes
• Travel watercolor kit: I already own Derwent watercolor pencils which I love. However, they are not the best suited for sketching on the go (imagine fumbling around with a bunch of pencils trying to find the right one). So I got this W&N Cotman Sketchers Pocket Box - its a neat little kit and is well recommended for watercolor beginners. And its only as big as my smartphone - I can literally carry this around in my jeans pockets
• Drawing/painting instruments: In my pouch, I packed my Pigma Micron waterproof pens, a couple of graphite pencils, a mechanical pencil for backup, my Pentel Aquash waterbrushes, a couple of travel watercolor brushes, an eraser and a sharpener
• Miscellaneous: I also packed a few other things to make life on the road easy. Some tissues (to clean up the brushes and any spills), binder clips (to hold pages or to clip on the watercolor kit to the sketchbook if required), a small plastic cup (to pour out some water if I need to use the regular watercolor brushes) and a small medicine dropper (to pour water into my waterbrushes without spilling it everywhere)

And that's it - that's all you need to get started with urban sketching! Now that I have packed my supplies (a week ahead of time!), all that's left to do is wait till the date of the workshop. I am soo excited, I can hardly wait!

Update: I did a sketch of some of the supplies in my travel kit using those very supplies :) And here is my sketch:

A sketch of my travel sketching kit

Back to school

The husband and I have decided to start our art education from the basics - we have both signed up for art classes at the local community college. I chose Basic Drawing (of course) and my husband chose Basic Guitar.

I have been dabbling in arts for the longest time, and have also attended a few classes. But art classes in India tend to be unstructured and mostly guided studio sessions, rather than classes. So when I saw weekend drawing classes on the Spring calendar at the Mission College, I jumped at the chance.

I am sure I will be posting a lot more blogs tagged under "Artsy-Craftsy" going forward - keep an eye out! 

Learning resources

Now that I have some spare time on my hands, I have been exploring online resources to satiate my thirst for learning. I know that sounds dramatic, but I just love to dabble in and learn new stuff. Especially stuff that I was always interested in but couldn't pursue as a part of my formal education. Over the past few weeks I have come across a number of free online learning resources which are incredible. The content is excellent and has good breadth, its freely available, and the best part - you can set your own pace for learning. You can also use these resources to gain brief exposure to a wide variety of fields, while you decide which fields you want to focus on. I have explored some of these, and am yet to get started on others. A few resources which interested me:

- Duolingo: Duolingo is a language learning website offering Spanish, English, French, German, Portugese and Italian. PD and I got started with Spanish a while back. Duolingo has "gamified" the learning process with points, loss of "lives" on making mistakes etc. Their mobile app (I have tried the one for iPhone) is awesome - it doesnt feel like work or learning and is pretty much fun! And its so much more exciting if you pair up with someone else who also wants to learn the language.

- Coursera and edX: Both of these are "Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)" platforms (I had to google that up :P) Each of them has tied up with a wide range of well known universities as partners. Courses are typically held through video lectures and quizes. Courses offered cover a wide range of fields such as humanities, computer science, statistics, sociology, etc. Excellent platforms to make such disciplines more accessible!

- Codeacademy: Codeacademy offers free classes in coding. I havent tried this yet, but PD has and he enjoyed it. The site currently offers  JavaScript, HTML/CSS, PHP, Python and Ruby. The site has a number of success stories of people with no coding experience who have learnt to code on codeacademy and went on to build successful mobile phone apps, programs for specifics projects/tasks, etc. Quite interesting really, and I hope to try sometime.

- Podcasts: Podcasts are quite an interesting way to learn while on the go - whether you are in the car or out walking/jogging or even while cooking. The iTunes store has a lot of interesting podcasts and a lot of these are free. A number of leading universities such as MIT, Princeton, etc. offer podcasts too. RadioLab is another good place to look for interesting podcasts. Podcasts are everywhere. These are just some that I have come across so far, but with a little bit of googling, you can find podcasts from a variety of sources on a wide range of topics.

And of course, there is the quintessential youtube.com where a number of channels focus on tutorials on a wide range of subjects - from photography to arts to science projects.

On the whole, I am quite excited about my discovery of these resources and hopefully will put them to good use.