Only a month to go…

It’s only one month until the Annual Urban Sketchers Symposium, happening in Chicago this year. As always, I’m super excited to be going. To meet old friends, make new ones and to learn from all of them. I’m teaching a workshop titled People Tell Tales: Using Action And Interaction To Tell Stories.  A book I reread every once in a while, especially in thinking about quick capture is Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s The Mind’s Eye. Written by a photographer who was constantly on a quest to tell stories with pictures, the book is full of insights for an urban sketcher.

Preparing for my workshop means I am particularly focussed on people sketching right now. This time, we’re going to explore story telling and choosing what to capture to bring that story to life.
Here’s some quick captures from last week. For this first one, I switched from my usual pen to a dip pen, because I wanted to slow down. A less familiar tool, one that made me pause to re-dip and to consider what I wanted to capture next seemed right for this scene.

Here are a few more captures from that morning. A dad and his twin girls take a quick break on the bench outside Starbucks.

Teen (or are they tween?) boys and a phone. They snickered a lot as they watched something on that phone.

Sometimes I like to sit on a bench and sketch a scene without any particular focus. Just the humdrum everyday activity of people passing by, standing and chatting and taking a break on a bench is my story.

But as I sat there, what really caught my attention is those lamps. So I did another sketch from the same vintage point, but this time the lamps are the focus and the coming and going of people under them completes the scene.