my sketchbook: September 2017

At the end of August my nephew got married in Israel and this was a good reason to come to a short visit and to spend a week full of family activities in my homeland. It was really very hot and humid so I didn’t spend a lot of time walking through the streets as I use to do, when I visit in March. Tel Aviv has several beautiful alleys which are shady and pleasant in summer. This one is Sderot Chen.

I was lucky and the Tel Aviv urban sketcher had a meeting on the one Friday that I was there. I joined them at the flea market in Jaffa. This flea market is quite a big area which is open every day of the year, full of stands of vintage, antik furnitures shops, old and new clothes, cafés and restaurants. Specially on Friday morning it’s very crowded as most of the people in Israel don’t work on friday. I found there a nice shaded corner and tried to catch the atmosphere around me.

Some pic. from the meeting with the creative sketchers of Tel aviv

Last weekend I joined the symposium of the german urban sketchers in Eutin together with100 enthusiastic sketchers. Eutin ist a small town in the north of Germany, surrounded by a number of lakes and is proud of it’s castle and it’s beautiful big park.

We gathered on friday afternoon for registration and were very exited to get this heavily filled goody bag! I started sketching immediately with the liquid gel ink pen from Pentel on the brown paper block from Boesner. A new experience for me.

In the evening we had a portrait party. I was in the „nougat“ group with Bibs, Antje and Sylvina. It was fun, we laughed a lot and it was a nice way to get to know each other.

On saturday morning I had a workshop with Tine Klein. Julia and me found a good place in the middle of the saturday market and where observing and sketching the busy market place. The people in Eutin were very curious and many stopped to watch us and talked with us. „Did you paint it yourself?“ „I also would like to paint, but I wait until I am in pension.“ „Why do you do it?“

My afternoon workshop was with Omar Jaramillo. The subject was „negative space“ and it was about aquarell painting. It was a very good experience for me sketching or painting without any lines just with the brush.

In the evening we were the audience of the theatre group „Mischpoke“ and sketched the actors in their rehearsal. We had to sketch really very fast!

On Sunday we had an open sketch-crawl and more sketchers came to join us. Here are the castle again from a different point of view, the church place and the market place.

Later on there was a vernissage of our exhibition in the castle.

It was a great weekend. I enjoyed every minute of sitting and drawing, being surrounded by other sketchers, meeting people face to face and associating drawings to their creators. It was heart warming and very inspiring.

Thank you Eutin! Next year in Hamburg!

I was drawn by Marion VO