I just got back the Urban Sketchers Symposium, held in the beautiful pink city of Toulouse, France
It was my 5th symposium, after Manchester, Porto (my favorite!), Amsterdam and Poznan, and was fantastic as usual.
What is the USK Symposium?
The Urban Sketchers Symposium is an annual international gathering of sketchers from around the world. It’s 3 packed days of workshops, lectures, demos, sketch walks, and the chance to meet hundreds of people who share the same passion for drawing on location.
Impressions from Toulouse
As Toulouse is one of my favorite cities, and as I was selected to give a demo this year, I was very very excited ! Even more excited than other years!
I prepared several skechtbooks of different sizes:
- a mini and a medium leporello sketchbook from Inusitado
- a square leporello sketchbook with my favorite hahnemühle paper made by my sketchbook friend Gaëlle Spaeth
- a regular sketchbook by Etchr
- loose watercolor paper from Hahnemûhle for my demo
- and in the workshop I followed with the Korean artist Inhong Park I received an A5-siezd mixed media sketchbook from Stillman & Birn
In this video I give you a sketchbook tour.
This year I arrived 3 days early. You can always find “warm up” gatherings all around the area and in neighboring countries! You can find these announcements of events mostly on the Symposium Facebook group and Instagram.
And I stayed 1 day longer. There are always a lot of people extending their trips so plenty of people to sketch with.
Other things which are good to prepare: stickers and business cards with your art to swap ! I collected plenty of stickers this year!
Takeaways from this symposium
- Take time to play and don’t rush ! It’s easy to get overwhelmed at the symposium because there’s so much to do and to see and to sketch, and so many people to meet! Even now after the symposium I feel sometimes frustrated when I see online people who were there that I didn’t get to meet… If you let yourselves be overwhelmed you will be frustrated. So just enjoy yourself, play around with your sketchbook and sketch what you feel like sketching
- Talk to people and ask them to see their sketchbook! It’s always inspiring!
- It’s a great time to experiment and try new sketching techniques! Everywhere in the city you can meet sketchers that sketch in a different way, with different tools, so have a look and play along! By trying out different ways of sketching, you can try different styles you like, and do it your way, with your lines and colors, and find eventually your own style and sketching personality
The Art Market
If you come to the symposium, make sure to have some room in your bags for new art supplies….
And next year the symposium will be in… TORONTO! Thank you for organizing, Canada !
Subscribe to https://urbansketchers.org/ to get emails about the tickets !
In the video below you can see my sketches from Toulouse!
Enjoy !
