SketchCrawl is a drawing marathon, originally conceived by Pixar storyboard artist Enrico Casarosa, and modeled as a pubcrawl, but with art materials. Artists gather in groups in various cities around the world and move from location to location within their respective cities, drawing what’s around them.

The results are often posted in blogs, Flickr groups and in the SketchCrawl forums.

This Saturday, November 21st, 2009, is the 25th World Wide SketchCrawl. You can look through the forum posts to see if anyone is organizing a SketchCrawl near you. Anyone can participate, at any level of sketching experience, including complete novice, and you can sketch with the group for a much or as little time that day as you choose.

Here are the guidelines for participation.

Prior to the event, the forum posts are about the locations and times of the events in various cities. After the event, look for the posts labeled “Results” to see comments about the event, photos and sketches from the day.

(Images above, from SketchCrawl 24, September, 2009: Gary Amaro, San Francisco, CA; “4ojos“, Ribafrecha, Spain; Guillaume Bonamy, Natsumi Tsuchida, Tokyo, Japan.)

Urban Sketchers is devoted to drawing on location in urban environments, and it has come a long way in the year since it was established by Gabi Campanario, an illustrator and journalist based in Seattle, Washington.

The blog now boasts a long list of invited corespondents from numerous cities and countries around the world, with a delightfully broad range of styles, mediums and approaches. Their first anniversary press release has the stats.

With its wide base of contributors, Urban Sketchers is updated often, making frequent visits rewarding. There is always something new and interesting.

You can browse by artist, listed in the left sidebar by name and home base location, or by subject tags on the right sidebar.

If you want to just flip through the entries in reverse chronological order, look for the small “Older Posts” link at the bottom of the center column.

Going forward, the group plans to formalize as a nonprofit organization, raise money for scholarships and grants, publish a book and organize international meetings; all in support of promoting location drawing, and enabling others to “See the world, one drawing at a time”.

(Images above: Matt Jones, Thomas Thorspecken, Benedetta Dossi, Gérard Michel, Stephen Gardner)

Melissa B. Tubbs is an Alabama based artist who takes inspiration in the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer and the traditions of past pen and ink artists, an finds particular delight in the patterns of light and shadow created by sunlight cascading against the details of architectural forms.

Her pen and ink drawings are rendered in textures and tones created in finely detailed crosshatching, used in places almost like washes. She utilizes them to give her architectural elements visceral textures of stone, brick, wood siding and other building materials. She also has a nice feeling for the textures of bark and leaves, flags and drapery and cloth awnings.

As you browse back through her blog posts, be sure to click on the images for the larger versions. Some of the older posts, in particular, feature linked images that are large enough to get a feeling for her hatching technique (image above, with detail below: Hunt Memorial, NYC).

Tubbs is represented by the Stonehenge Gallery in Montgomery, Alabama; and her drawing of Carnegie Hall in NYC will be featured in the drawing collection Strokes of Genius 2: Light and Shadow, by Rachael Rubin Wolf, to be published in October.

[Via EmptyEasel]

Having apparently put aside traditional drawing for a while, Adolfsson returned to regular drawing when he started his sketchblog Mattias Inks, in 2006. Since then he has populated it with a wonderful and fast growing assortment of whimsical drawings on a variety of subjects and themes.

Usually drawing with a Namiki Falcon fountain pen and Noodler’s American Eel ink, and often in the pages of Moleskine sketchbooks, Adolfsson draws charmingly offbeat characters, animals, robots and architectural fantasies, as well as more straightforward sketches of his surroundings.

He often fills out his drawings with watercolor to varying degrees, usually with light touches that leave the feeling of the ink drawing intact.

For someone who has only been drawing recently for a couple of years, Adolfsson has been prolific; his Flickr galleries go on for dozens of pages.

He also has a web site with galleries of his drawings, doodles and sketch books; as well as an Etsy shop in which he sells original art.

One of his excursions into fanciful imaginings is his interpretation of “Star Wars, the baroque version” (expanded page version here), with a curly-wig helmeted Darth Vader, blunderbuss and balloon-pak equipped Bobba Fett, and Han Solo being harassed by the puritan police at the base of his eminently baroque Millennium Falcon (top, left).

I particularly enjoy Adolfsson’s architectural imaginings, like his houseflowers (top, right) and ornate, leaning, single-room-stacked “skyscraper prototypes” (left).

Mattias Adolfsson is giving a workshop in drawing this July 29-31 (more information here, in Swedish); and is currently working on a children’s book titled Till mitt barnbarn.

[Via 'skine art]

She previously worked for Flagship Studios in Hellgate London and has done work for Wizards of the Coast, Platinum Studios and others.

In addition to her concept art, character and object design and illustration, Nelson also does some comics work.

Her web site has example from various categories, but particularly of interest is the “Fine Art” section which includes some very nice figure drawings, cast drawings and portraits, including the self-portrait above, lower left.

Nelson also maintains a blog on which she posts sketches, finished paintings and works in progress; and discusses her ongoing and upcoming projects.

[Via Marc Taro Holmes (see my post on Marc Taro Holmes)]

Participants can upload and share their drawings, or even draw directly online, through sites like deviantART, YouTube, Red Bubble, Drawspace, Rate My Drawings, Flickr and a number of others. (It’s worth investigating the list of participating sites just to see if some of them are new and of interest to you.)

The ambitious goal of 1 million drawings may or may not be reached, but the event is a fun way to capture a little attention for the act of drawing, and perhaps kindle some contact and community among participants.

The Drawing Day web site gives an overview of the turnout from the first event, and points to some galleries of uploaded drawings from the day, as well as videos of users drawing on YouTube and even virtural drawing in SecondLife.

There is also a blog associated with the event, which covers news about participating sites and, of course, is counting down time to the event.

Drawing Day is the first Saturday of June each year, and this year it’s this Saturday, June 6, 2009.

(Image above, a detail from Rembrandt’s etching Landscape with a Man Sketching a Scene, in which the artist caught a fellow artist sketching the same cottage that was his subject.)

Since then, hundreds of additional sketches have been added; and the blog’s layout has been updated, with a wider format and better organizatation (though I still wish they would somehow limit the Flickr slideshow widget at page bottom to a single page and make the “Older Posts” link bigger).

Urban Sketchers has kept the tagline of “See the world one drawing at a time”, and continues to a be a source of constant delight, filled with location sketches in a variety of media, size, approach and degree of finish.

There is an increasing list of contributors, as well as an impressively extended list of represented cities and countries from around the world; though much of the content is still provided by a core of frequent contributors, including founder Gabi Campanario. (Sadly, Gabi’s recent sketches have been chronicling the impending demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a terrific newspaper; image above, top right)

Many of the images are linked to larger versions, and most of the contributors have their own blogs and web sites to which you can go for even more sketches and finished work. Some of them are profiled on the Meet the Correspondents page, but others are worth tracking down through links at the bottom of their posts, or looking up via Google.

Updates are frequent and you can check in with Urban Sketchers any day and find fresh new sketches to enjoy and take inspiration from. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to check in frequently enough to keep up with the new posts.

(Images above, left to right: Pete Scully, Gabi Campanario, Tommy Kane, Tis Boon Sim, Roger O’Reilly, Gerard Michel, Stephen Gardner, Maarten Ruijters)

That’s right, good ol’ big yellow box of ‘em, wax in paper wrappers, wears down to a nub in your hands, drew with ‘em when you were five, Crayola Crayons. She doesn’t add other mediums, melt the wax or otherwise manipulate them, she has simply become very adept at handling wax crayons as a medium.

It was an email from Tiona, letting me know about her work, that prompted my post yesterday about Crayola Crayons as an art medium.

Marco earned a degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and was teaching art to elementary school children in Mexico, where she had few resources for her own artistic endeavors, but access to plenty of crayons. She began to experiment with the potential of crayons to create art and on returning to the U.S. had a fortuitous encounter with Don Marco, an artist who had already mastered the use of Crayola Crayons as a medium.

Don Marco took on Tiona as an apprentice and Tiona, on establishing herself as an artist, took on her mentor’s last name as her own professional name.

Tiona Marco’s web site has galleries of her work in several categories, along with a brief bio. Most of the works have links indicating if the original is available for purchase, and often offering prints as well.

Many of the pieces are accompanied by comments. The image above, left, for example, is both part of a series of drawings of women in hats, and a nod to her fondness for the work of Vermeer.

Marco also has a blog, in which she discusses how she got into wax crayons as a medium, and offers several videos in which she explains some of her techniques, as well as giving advice on how to care for an original done in wax crayons.

Wax crayons are a fond symbol of childhood (and/or or child rearing) for many of us. That wonderful smell (is there a sweeter perfume?) can instantly transport us back in time; but how soon we leave our crayons behind, forgotten in the dusty toy boxes of our early youth.

The thought of children’s wax crayons as a serious artistic medium would strike most artists as absurd. It’s simply “not done”; but, like many other mediums that are considered “inappropriate” by the arts establishment (ball-point pen for instance), they are the subject of narrow classification. Anything that makes marks on a surface can be a tool for visual art. Contemporary artists Don Marco and Tiona Marco (not related, but teacher and student) use Crayola Crayons as their primary medium.

Though there are other manufacturers of wax crayons, like Rose Art and Dixon Ticonderoga (Prang), Crayola dominates both the market and the history of modern wax crayons.

Wax crayons are not dissimilar to other colored drawing media — a pigment suspended in a binder; in this case, paraffin wax, a petroleum derivative.

They are perhaps not intended to be as long lasting as other mediums (though wax has been useful as a binder for art materials for hundreds, if not thousands, of years), or to have as expensive or “pure” a pigment content; but as with any medium the important factor is the result achieved.

The word “crayon” has other connotations in art, sometimes simply referring to a stick of almost any drawing material, but usually referring to chalks (”craie” is the French word for chalk).

Chalk crayons were famously used by Baroque and Rococo artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Antione Watteau in the “aux trois crayons” method of drawing with black, red (sanguine) and white chalks on toned paper; a method particularly effective in figure drawing and portraiture (see my post on Sanguine Drawing).

In particular we associate the term crayon with the chalks and graphite sticks in a gum binder created around the turn of the 18th Century by Nicholas Conté, and known as “Conté Crayons” (see my post on Pencils).

Wax crayons may actually be more similar in their application to mediums like oil pastels, also called wax oil crayons, that are a combination of pigment, non-drying oil (as opposed to the drying oils used in oil paint) and a wax binder.

Unlike oil pastels, which get a modicum of respect, wax crayons seem firmly relegated to the toy box instead of the paint box; but perhaps that’s an advantage.

Maybe it’s a plus that they carry that connotation with them, and that picking one up immediately connects with that part of our past in which we were unrestricted by artistic convention, free to indulge in the playful whims that we lose touch with all too easily as adults. Did we ever feel “creatively blocked” as children playing with crayons? Hardly.

Maybe we would all benefit from working, however briefly, with a medium that comes with a built in connection to the wide-eyed innocence and playful explorations of childhood.

A box of eight is a little over a dollar and you can buy them just about anywhere (worth the price just for that wonderful smell).

I’ve long been an admirer of Rembrandt’s drawings, particularly those done in reed pen, bistre ink and wash. (Bistre ink is made by boiling wood soot, often taken from wood-buring chimneys, in water. It produces as yellow-brown, transparent ink that was not favored for writing, but is well suited to drawings with washes.)

In attempting to emulate Rembrandt’s sketching methods (and those of other master ink and wash draughtsmen), I’ve even made my own reed pens (moderately successfully) and bistre ink (unsuccessfully); but eventually settled on modern tools, a steel nibbed pen like a Hunt/Speedball 108 and washes of modern sepia-colored drawing inks, or other brown or red-brown inks (as opposed to real cuttlefish sepia, which can be problematic).

There are more interesting drawing inks appearing in recent years, like Walnut Ink and Noodler’s Drawing Inks, but I haven’t tried them yet.

So for a while I was carrying around a sketching kit of a sketchpad, pen holders and points, a bottle of ink, a bottle of wash, a watercolor brush, rinsing water and a wiping cloth. Perhaps comparable to what the old guys carried around, but more awkward than a modern portable pocket watercolor kit.

I wanted something I could stick in my pocket and have with me to sketch at a whim, without the mess and fuss, but I still wanted to sketch in brown line and wash.

After trying various tools, I settled on a couple of Sakura Pigma Micron markers with sepia colored (brown) ink in different sizes, usually 05 and 005, and a Tombow Dual Brush-Pen, “Tan”, #942 (many of the other colors in these markers are too dark to be used for washes).

The Pigma Microns are water-fast once dry, which is almost immediately. I can wash over them at will with the Tombow, which is light enough for relatively light washes, and can be built up a bit with repeated passages. The Pigma Microns can also be used over the wash which results in an interesting bit of bleed and rough line.

The result is a reasonable approximation of ink and wash, as in my drawing below (larger version here), and makes for a simple, easy to carry, no-mess sketch kit that lets me draw in ink and “wash” wherever I go (though the Tombow Brush-Pen is a bit big to casually carry in a pocket).

(BTW, I know I’ve got a lot of nerve posting one of my own drawings with a Rembrandt, but I’ve learned over time how horribly counter-productive it is to be intimidated by others’ work; so I refuse to be intimidated even by the great masters. Inspired, yes, intimidated, no.)

For a nice off-white suface, on which the brown ink lines and washes look great, I use Strathmore Series #400 sketchpads. They have a nice paper with a slight tooth that takes light washes well, and are slim enough at 24 sheets to slip into a pocket or case easily. (I also use Moleskine Cahier softbound sketchbooks, which are even thinner, about the size and appearance of a U.S. passport.)

While I’m at it, I’ll recommend a good book on pen and ink drawing: Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur L. Guptill and Susan E. Meyer, and a nice inexpensive book on Rembrandt’s drawings in color (which really makes a difference) is Rembrandt Drawings: 116 Masterpieces in Original Color from Dover Books.

You can also look for Rembrandt drawings in color on the terrific web site Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work (see my post on author Jonathan Janson, the Rembrandt site, and the related site, Essential Vermeer).

Here is a larger version of the Rembrandt drawing at the top of the article, and another Rembrandt ink and wash drawing that I just love.

There are other variations on portable ink and wash drawing, of course; a nice fountain pen with waterproof ink and a Niji Waterbrush, in which you could carry your own mixture of wash, would be more flexible, but a bit more trouble.

I’ve been happy though, with the portability and flexibility of my “Pocket Rembrandt”, and the wonderful character halfway between drawing and painting produced when rendering with washes. If you haven’t tried it, pick up a “Pocket Rembrandt” kit and head for the marshes.