About 20 sketchers toasted each other with sparkling cider outside of ArtSpot Thursday evening to kick off the 2024 Sketcher Fest Edmonds. Some had attended last year’s first Sketcher Fest and were eager to learn from visiting artists and connect with other sketchers worldwide.
After last year’s exhibit “Sketching Cascadia” at Graphite Art Center that drew hundreds of sketchers from around the world, Urban Sketchers founder Gabriel “Gabi” Campanario asked Edmonds artist Tracy Felix if she would join the planning committee and take on coordinating sponsorships.
“This project is all volunteer. It is truly a labor of love,” Felix said. “The goal is to share this pure and simple activity with other people who love to draw when they travel or as a way to document and experience where they are and what they are experiencing. The payoff of this event is the camaraderie. We inspire each other. Sketchers are truly generous and a lot of fun too!”
Urban Sketchers is a global community of artists who practice on-location drawing. Founded in 2007 by Campanario, the group encourages members to capture their surroundings from direct observation, promoting the artistic and storytelling value of sketching everyday scenes.
The movement began with a Flickr group and quickly grew into an international network, with local chapters hosting sketching events and workshops. Urban Sketchers emphasizes sharing artwork online to connect sketchers worldwide.
“My contacts from ArtSpot and the Edmonds local business community proved to be both generous and fun to work with,” Felix said. “The Edmonds Creative District and Art Walk Edmonds also had a presence at Sketcher Fest. Cascadia Art Museum offered free entry to participants throughout the weekend. Sponsors were willing to not only donate much-needed funds to help make Sketcher Fest happen but also hosted a variety of events. Without their support, the festival would not have been able to offer as many people a chance to participate.”
While Felix and many other of her artistic peers have been drawing most of their lives, Felix began sketching during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and started the “Sketching Edmonds” group.
“It has met once a month for over three years now!” Felix said.
The 2024 Sketcher Fest featured artists who taught workshops and performed demos on various sketching techniques and the thought process behind sketching. These artists include Gail Wong, Jane Wingfield, Mário Linhares, David Chamness, Eleanor Doughty and James Hobbs.
During the Sketcher Fest reception on Friday, Campanario said that Brackett’s Landing was where he and his family saw Puget Sound for the first time when they moved to Seattle in 2006. “I love the small scale of the city [of Edmonds],” Campanario said. “You can walk around and be by the water. There’s no better place to be than the Seattle area, even if it’s been hotter lately.”
Campanario then introduced British artist James Hobbs, who is the author of Sketch Your World, which is a comprehensive guide for sketching and drawing in various environments, and Pen and Ink, which focuses on techniques for these mediums. His latest book, Sketchbook Reveal, talks about his early years of sketching and how his artwork evolved since the 1980s. Each chapter tells the history of Hobbs’ life, including his early travels in England in a van and the death of his father.
Hobbs often uses a thick black marker to create striking depictions of urban scenes in London and other English towns. His sketches are characterized by their simplicity and immediacy, allowing viewers to feel the vibrancy of the city through his eyes.
“In social media, artists inevitably choose to share only what they consider their best work, but that tells only half the story,” Hobbs said. “If sketchbooks are used as places to experiment and try out new ideas, they will have some duds and stinkers among the gems, whoever the artist is. And it’s worth reminding those starting their artistic journey that, contrary to the intimidatingly pristine quality of most Instagram posts by experienced artists, failure is a normal part of the creative journey.”
Since 1984, Hobbs has filled more than 200 sketchbooks, averaging four to five each year, showcasing his commitment to the craft. While he has experimented with various mediums, Hobbs has found a particular joy in using thick black marker pens and fude fountain pens, which lend a distinctive quality to his work.
In his presentation, he took his audience through his sketching journey from how three artists had influenced his work (Czech-French photographer Josef Koudelka, German-British painter Frank Auerbach and British painter and sketcher Dennis Creffield), and his travels in New York City, Miami and Amsterdam, ending with the influence of his ailing father. Hobbs sketched the scene outside the window where his father would take in the view while sitting in his armchair.
“It’s not so much about the ‘how’ in a drawing but the ‘why’,” Hobbs said. “That’s more important to me. Who were you with? Why did that happen? I think sketchbooks are there to be drawn in and to experiment with.”
Edmonds sketcher Karen Brighton said she got into sketching in 2018 because she was looking for a way to return art to her life on a regular basis after she retired from her job at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
“Urban sketching was a way for me to feel part of a community of artists,” Brighton said. “At the first Urban Sketching outing, I met a group of strangers who shared my interests, and they welcomed me with open arms. Previous to sketching, my art interest was photography. I enjoyed the way photography made me slow down and look at the world around me with new eyes. Sketching was another step in that direction. It slows me down and engages my attention even more.”
Brighton said she was also delighted to interact with artists whose work she enjoyed on Instagram. “I also witnessed my fellow participants making new friends and going out on sketching adventures around Edmonds independent of Sketcher Fest,” she said. “And this is really what this is all about: connection.”
Like Brighton, urban sketcher Marcia Schrotenboer from Holland, Michigan, said she loves getting together with other sketchers whom she had been watching online. When Schrotenboer attended an urban sketchers group in Chicago last year, she thought meeting sketching teachers, such as Mário Linhares, would be like meeting a rock star where “they are above you.” However, she found that experience to be the opposite.
“Everyone’s so down to earth and [you] just have a conversation and learn from each other,” Schrotenboer said. “I think James Hobb’s talk tonight was encouraging to all of us. Every page is important and it’s about the process of making art.”
Schrotenboer started making art in 2017 when she was an activity director at a retirement community. She noticed that one of the residents would take her sketchbook when she traveled around the world.
“I would observe her and take pictures and I thought it was cool,” Schrotenboer said. “I thought it would be something I would do. After one of these trips, I said to my husband, ‘I wish I could do what she does.’ ‘Did you ever try,’ he said. So I started to do every single day and came upon Sketchbook Skool, and through the school, I found Urban Sketchers.”
She traveled to Seattle in 2019 to visit family and connected with Urban Sketchers Seattle, where members were going to sketch at the Wintergrass festival in Bellevue. “That was my first time sketching with others,” Schrotenboer said. “That lit a little flame that caused me to think I’d like to have a group like this in West Michigan.” Later she met a fellow sketcher from Chicago who had moved to western Michigan, and they started Urban Sketching West Michigan in 2022.
While nothing is set in stone for next year’s Sketcher Fest Edmonds, Felix said that she is taking a “leap of faith” that many people want to make the event happen again.
“The sponsors, volunteers, local businesses, the city, the neighbors who all choose to help out in big and small ways make this happen,” Felix said. “I think they will because it was such a fulfilling experience. Sketcher Fest brings out the best in people. The myriad of interactions build connections that often continue after the hoopla settles back down into regular life.”
The most challenging part of this year’s Sketcher Fest, Felix said, is the year-long planning and “many moving parts” that must come together to give every participant a positive experience.
“I had a blast! I’m exhausted but happy I got to be a part of it,” Felix said. “I’m looking through my sketchbook memories of Sketcher Fest Edmonds 2024 and ready to go out and sketch some more. I bet a lot of people are feeling the same way.”
— Story and photos by Nick Ng
