The final afternoon of the Urban Sketching Symposium… I for one was utterly exhausted, but still excited, and eager to keep sketching. I didn’t join the field sketching session I’d signed up for (mostly because I was messing about having fun taking photos of Gerard’s sketchbook laid out in the street), and stayed relatively close to the PNCA. I popped into Oblation Papers & Press, and bought myself an extremely nice sketchbook/notebook (because I needed yet another one), bound with a cover making it look like a French paperback. They are all produced on site, with top quality paper. And so, back to the sketching. I passed this one building, an old former warehouse, many times, and so decided to capture it in three drawings, vignette style, but without the borders I usually use. Because I was sat across the street, with trees in my way, I used those as my border. Ah, it was an experiment, sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t. It was a lot of fun drawing the building itself though, with its faded paintwork and old empty water tower stand. There is a lot of character in buildings like these.

Right outside it, an object I know my two-year-old son would love. I presume it to be some sort of bike rack, or street art, or something I don’t know, but it is shaped like a car and has a steering wheel at two-year-old height. It was similar to the ones shaped like the Fremont Bridge that are also dotted about. I was told by some of the Portland sketchers that it’s city law for any new development to have part of their budget dedicated to placing public art around any new building. That, my friends, is immeasurably cool.

The clock was ticking. This was, in fact, Worldwide Sketchcrawl Day #28, so hundreds of people (probably more) around the world were also out drawing their cities. The Symposiums sketchers, however, were being magnetically drawn back to the source, the PNCA (Pacific Northwest College of Art), where the Symposium was being held. I think everybody was capturing the building as their last sketch of this experience. I joked to Mike Daikabura that this was like the red-light district of sketching, urban sketchers on every corner (and you had to get in early for the best spot!). My last drawing, of the PNCA, is the one at the top of this post.

Okay, time’s up, pen’s down! On to the closing reception, to have a look at everybody’s sketchbooks. In fact, you can see photos and drawings from the Symposium in the “Urban Sketchers PDX 2010” Flickr group.

Symposium blog: http://pdx2010.urbansketchers.org/