Sunday 8 September 2019

Amsterdam - Urban Sketchers Symposium 2019


This was my third symposium, and first visit to Europe. I had a great time and it was so awesome!
Amsterdam is such a photogenic city, you can sit anywhere and get a great sketch.

Let the journey to Amsterdam begin. Auckland to Brisbane -and the requisite airport sketch!

Layover at Brisbane airport. Nothing appears to change here. Same furniture. Same sculptures. 

Flying 14 hours from Brisbane to Dubai with Emirates. Luckily the flight wasn't full, and we could spread out over four seats! Even then, there wasn't huge amounts of sleep, so after getting bored with endless movies, I sketched.

Zuiderkerk [South Church] was the hub of the symposium.

Workshop with Marion Rivolier. Tried to use my markers to approximate the water colour techniques she was teaching.

Workshop with Roisin Cure, goose quill and brown ink - very nice to work with.
Workshop with Eduardo Bajzek. A technique that gives a great moody effect.
Really enjoyed this one, as it bought me back to my roots of pencil work.

Before heading to the symposium workshops each day, I used three cool mornings to complete this sketch of the amazing buildings of Amsterdam
As a member of the USK Social media team, I seek out and repost every night to the Instagram account. At the symposium I also did quick interviews of sketchers, which was fun. But in the lead up, we noted that we were approaching 200,000 followers, so we wanted to commemorate this. We sent out a call for involvement #USK200k, then we selected the finalist, and I edited them into a power point to be played at the symposium. It was a fun project, and we got close, but it wasn't until after we got home that we actually hit the 200k mark. Nevermind. I reformatted the presentation into two Instagram videos, and we celebrated from afar.

The silent auction at the final night function -great art donated to fund raise for the USK committee

The final big photo of all 600+ sketchers.
I met up with some awesome old friends, and made some new awesome friends.
So very satisfying on so many levels.

The 2020 symposium was announced for Hong Kong at Easter.
Unlikely I'll attend, but that's OK. My pattern is every two-years, and I've been to HK several times before.