Sketching with a Friend

10 1/2" x 2" Franklin's Garden

Jim busy "smudging"

with some new friends

On of the things that I learned and accessed through Urban Sketchers is how fun and it is to sketch with others.  Last weekend, I was in Toronto and spent a delightful afternoon with Jim Belisle sketching on Centre Island.  Jim was one of my wonderful professors at University of Toronto and I got to know him as a teaching assistant for a couple of terms.  He kept sketchbooks then and also introduced me to drop-in life drawing. He has been filing sketchbooks all his lfe and has not lost his enthusiasm to "make smudges".

So all these years later, it was not only fun to catch up but compare techniques and ideas.  He had generously bought me a box of watercolour crayons.  These are softer and more vibrant than  watercolor pencils and amped up my usual muted wash. So in addition to catching up I tried something new and came home full of ideas and enthusiasm for filling sketchbooks.

We encamped and did three sketches, of increasingly larger sketchbooks, from the same location.  That was an interesting exercise in itself and always fun to compare what we chose to portray.  I focused on the landform while Jim (lower sketch) dove into the colour and texture of the perennials in the foreground.