Usk Chicago Part 4: Workshop at The Bean (and a free download)

Another year of teaching at the Symposium. And what a great location I taught at! Anish Kapoor‘s Cloud Gate, better knows as The Bean. A huge, reflective, you guessed it: bean-shaped sculpture that people can’t help but interact with.

Here are some sketches at The Bean done before and during the workshops.

We started our workshop where I always like to start: with warmup gesture drawings to capture people full of action. We looked at what it takes to move our drawings from being static to being dynamic.

Next, we focussed on capturing more elusive gestures and telling stories even through very quick sketches. Every participant was handed a little green sticky note shaped like a speech bubble. With their sketch, they wrote a very simple story into it.

With 3 workshops of really enthusiastic participants, we captured lots of really fun stories, with people doing handstands, taking selfies galore, pretending to hold up The Bean and many, many more stories. I wish I’d photographed some of their sketches, but taking photos is something I never find the time to do during a workshop!

A big thank you to all the participants. It’s always an honor to teach at the Symposium, share my enthusiasm for urban sketching and people sketching in particular, and to learn from you.

Click this link to download my workshop handout.  It’s been designed to be printed double-sided on a letter-sized sheet and folded as a handout. So if you just view the pdf online, use the page numbers to make sense of how to read it.

Happy Sketching!