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)

He indicates that he drew extensively as a child, but lost interest in drawing for a time and only returned to the practice a few years ago. He began to carry a pen and sketchbook and draw his surroundings, and has since added watercolor to his sketching materials.

Belair says he considers drawing his form of meditation, an escape from the stresses of working, and devotes time to it whenever he can.

His watercolor sketches of city scenes, particularly those of row homes or industrial and commercial structures, are wonderful in their contrasts of texture light and shadow.

He takes on complex scenes as a challenge, working immediately in ink and watercolor, without preliminary pencil sketches, on subjects like metal bridgework and elevated train structures.

He now frequently works in 5×8 watercolor sketchbooks and has posted a Flicker stream of his sketches.

Belair also contributes to Urban Sketchers, which is where I encountered his work.

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]

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.)

The app lets you record the painting process and play it back, and the New Yorker article linked above includes a time laps video of his process.

I say “fingerpainted” because unlike other small mobile computing platforms, the iPhone and iPod touch is a touch-screen interface, meant to be used without a stylus, so your finger becomes the “brush”. This seems a little ungainly compared to stylus based small screen painting applicaitons, but the results indicate that you can do some interesting work with it.

Colombo did his sketch in about an hour while standing outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

On Colombo’s web site you will find some of his iPhone sketches, along with other done in pencil and colored digitally. He is also offering prints of some of the iPhone work.

In addition, there is a section of video and press coverage of his New Yorker iPhone sketch cover.

[Suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris]

Some of us who have never been to Bozeman think of it as a literary location, having been the setting for part of Robert Pirsig’s remarkable Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a surprising number of other cultural references, including being the nominal location of the Star Trek: First Contact movie (co-written by Bozeman native Brannon Braga). It is also the site of Montana State University and is apparently rich with other colorful points of history.

Heaston focused his interest in the historic architecture of Bozeman, the town’s Main Street, from Grand to Rouse Avenues, and as a challenge to himself, drew every building on every block in that area, on both sides of the street, from direct observation in his Moleskein sketchbook (which he apparently filled exactly, without intending to). The project started in October of 2008 and just wrapped up on May 10 of this year.

It’s interesting to note that the seasons changed over the course of his project, giving it in interesting dimension of time as well as space.

Heaston’s approach, is an immediate and direct drawing in pen (that I assume is a fine point marker like a Pigma Micorn or Staedtler, though I didn’t find a mention of drawing instrument), with a casual feeling, even while enjoying the portrayal of surface textures. He even seems to have a cavalier disregard for making his architectural lines straight.

In some drawings, he winds up with what looks like curved perspective – like a photograph through a wide angle lens (which some have suggested is truer to the way we actually see than traditional “straight line” perspective).

The casual feeling of his drawings brings to mind the sketchbooks of Robert Crumb and Chris Ware.

I came across Heaston’s Bozeman Main Street Project on Urban Sketchers, where he is a correspondent. There is an article about the project, as well as one about its completion. The entire project is posted as a Flicker set.

Heaston has a web site with galleries that include other drawings and graphics, as well as his oil paintings. The latter are largely a series of gestural, painterly standing portraits, that are informal both in composition and the sitter’s (stander’s?) attire.

Heaston also maintains a blog, three letter word for art, on which you will find many other sketches and the stories behind them.

I then looked him up and found his sketch blog, SKETCHtaro, which has a wonderful array of his sketches, largely in watercolor or pen and ink, of both landscapes and figures.

His figure drawings have an engaging looseness, within the framework of accomplished draftsmanship. He has an unusual approach, sometimes drawing the figure in line, but multi-colored watercolor line, applied in brushstrokes that vary in weight and translucency as well as color .

His black ink drawings are frequently concerned with shadow and the play of light across architectural details.

Holmes is professionally a gaming concept artist and art director. According to his short bio on ConceptArt.org, he is currently the Studio Art Director at Ensemble Studios, and and has worked on gaming titles like Neverwinter Nights and The Lord of the Rings Online. MobyGames lists some of his other credits here. [Correction: Holmes has moved on from Ensemble and is now doing concept art for the film industry. See this post's comments.]

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)

Roibal’s blog is often devoted to portraits of another sort, chronicling his practice of sketching character studies of people currently in the news directly on newspaper articles about those people.

This is one of those cool ideas that obviously came about as the result of doodling and daydreaming (you know, the stuff you’re told not to do in school), and maintains some of that feeling of informal happenstance even though he’s been at it for a while.

If the article isn’t from a corner of the paper that happens to include the date, Roibal clips out a dateline and pastes it on the piece. (I’m surprised he resisted the temptation to call this “Faces in the News” or something similar.)

I picked a couple of significant events out of his recent crop, showing Obama drawn on an article about his victory in the presidential election, and ace Cole Hammels sketched over an article about the Phillies’ long-overdue clinching of the World Series (YAAAAAAAAAA!!!…er, sorry, where was I?…)

Both the ephemeral nature of newsprint and the informal character of ballpoint pen give the drawings a sense of immediacy and make them feel like a natural part of the daily newsflow.

This should be a syndicated feature.