How do you tell the story of a place through your sketches? The answer is not in any single sketch, of course. The answer emerges slowly across a series of sketches, both large and small, captured in a single sketchbook. Turning the pages, these sketches reflect the essence of the location and your responses to place.
This five-day workshop is designed to give participants a variety of skills to help them feel confident while sketching on location — capturing people, places and things that evoke a time and a place — and return home with a sketchbook filled with fresh and colorful sketches.
As part of a small group, participants will observe plenty of demos (studio exercises and on-location) and receive individual attention as we work on value studies, color, composition, vignettes, lettering, simplifying a scene, and keeping our watercolors fresh. We’ll focus on having fun while we sketch, recording as much as we can as we capture gardens, historic buildings and surrounding landscapes of the Hudson River Valley. Each day will end with a review and a critique.
In this workshop participants will learn how to:
- Capture the visual story of a place
- Create focal points in their sketches
- Work quickly and confidently in ink and watercolor
- Create vignettes and multi-sketch page layouts enhanced with hand-lettering
About Shari Blaukopf
Shari Blaukopf, a Montreal-based painter, teacher, author and art blogger, is best known for her urban scenes in watercolour. She has a BFA in graphic design from Concordia University, but her true love has always been watercolour painting. She began painting in her teens and is fortunate to have studied with some of the greats: Edgar A. Whitney, Frank Webb, Skip Laurence, Milford Zornes, Tom Hoffmann and Frederick Wong. Her paintings are in corporate, government and private collections in Canada, the United States and abroad, and her work has been showcased in many books on urban sketching. She travels widely to paint and to share her distinctive approach in sold-out workshops devoted to sketching and painting en plein air.
Shari is co-founder of Urban Sketchers Montreal, and a signature member of the American Watercolor Society and the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour. You can find her online courses at Learn.ShariBlaukopf.com and Craftsy.com. Her book, The Urban Sketching Handbook: Working with Color, was published in 2019 by Quarry Books. She has given many watercolour workshops both on her own and through the Urban Sketchers Workshop Program in North America, Europe and Asia.
Rates & Enrollment
Day Student Tuition: $1,200.00
Full 5-Day Package*: $2,917.85-$3,131.69
*5-Day Workshop Package includes: Tuition for 5 full class days, 6 nights of dinner, lodging, breakfast, daily cookie and fruit breaks, unlimited coffee and tea, and welcoming wine and cheese reception. Your choice between a room to yourself (single occupancy) or bring a friend and split a room (double occupancy).
Get more information about your options to enroll here.