After the Halle de La Machine on Wednesday I went straight to the Symposium Hub, which was at a municipal building called Pierre Baudis, and unlike at any other symposium there was a security search and metal detectors before you could go inside. That slowed things down, and there was a long line to enter the building. Good place to chat to people, but it was annoying to have to do that every day. It was packed inside, but the system to get registered and pick up the lanyard and goody bag was well run; there were about 800 sketchers registered for this event, it was massive compared to how it used to be. Like last year, more than half were first-time Symposium attendees too. It really has grown so, so much since that first Symposium in 2010 (see these posts with tag “UskPDX10”!), and since Urban Sketchers launched in 2008 (see this post!). So many people were in pink, the colour of Toulouse, and not just the hi-viz volunteers. It was very exciting. It was also still so very hot, and not any less sweaty inside. I did sketch during the opening reception, and caught up with old sketching friends, but I will post that separately. I then went quickly to watch the England semi-final at a pub which, very annoyingly, they lost, against that lot. I already posted that. Let’s fast forward to Thursday morning, then. After a nice breakfast at the hotel I walked up to the Hub, about 20-25 minutes from my hotel, to catch the morning remarks. Of course I missed those, because the line to get through security was really long. Hopefully I didn’t miss anything too important. I did at least arrive in time for the Presentations, which is always one of my favourite parts of a Symposium, getting to hear another urban sketcher speak about something, I find it really inspiring. Last year’s ones (Elizabeth Alley adventuring in the Arctic, Rita Sabler telling difficult stories around the world and Detlef Surrey following the Berlin Wall) were really fascinating. I like to draw these talks and take loads of notes of course, as I do all the time anyway. This one was by Len Grant, a Manchester based artist whose work I’ve followed for a while, I think since the Manchester 2016 Symposium. He was presenting on the theme of “Publishing a Neighbourhood Sketchbook in 154 Easy Steps”. Since this is something I have been thinking about doing for ages, Davis, I was particularly interested in what he had to say. His books look great, and his talk was very funny, I took a lot of notes. I sat next to Yves Damin from Paris who also sketched. I am always surprised at how few people are sketching along at these talks these days, but I’m someone who can’t really stop. Len said he has four books based on neighbourhoods in Manchester, and that got me thinking, yeah I could do two about Davis, one for the city and one for the campus, but then what about London, I would love to do a Burnt Oak and Edgware book, then do one for every other part of London that has meaning to me, Crouch End and Highgate, Camden Town, Tottenham, and then I think wait, I’ve been talking about a Davis one for more than a decade and still haven’t found time. Well maybe I’ll get going on that. If I get time.

I had a one-workshop Symposium pass this time, same as last year, but my workshop was not until Friday so I joined the Thursday Morning Sketchwalk, which was going to be starting at the same place as the Welcome Sketchwalk the day before, down by the river. It was a fairly long walk down there but there were people to talk to. Spotting symposium attendees all around was easy enough, with our orange lanyards and nametags (great for when you can’t remember people’s names) and those bright yellow bags that all the art goodies came in, they might be my favourite symposium bags yet, with ‘Loulou’ on them. I sketched some of the volunteers at the start as we all gathered, many others were heading off on their workshops, and those tall sticks with the pink signs on were very helpful. The army of volunteers really made the whole thing run smoothly.

We gathered to sketch on the high Embankments by Place de la Daurade. The panorama sketch above was of sketchers looking out across the Garonne. It had pre-splattered it with light coloured paint, in fact this was done a couple of days before because I had expected to eb drawing fireworks but that didn’t happen, so I drew sketchers. Genine Carvalheira is there on the left, and there was a sketcher from Canada over there too who I spoke to for a bit (but cannot remember her name; this is why I write them down!). The others were a group of sketchers from Madrid who I didn’t get a chance to speak to that day, but I happened upon them a few days later in Carcassonne, and sketched alongside them, and made friends with them even though I speak no Spanish and they spoke no English. We speak Urban Sketching. Lovely people, they gave me an Urban Sketchers Madrid badge.

Here are a few more people I sketched down there, above you have Sander from Mechelen, in Belgium, sat sketching with his headphones on, we spoke for a little while, and then I drew a couple of sketchers from Austria, Victoria Krisai and Jelde Flessner (I mis-spelled his first name), very quick sketchesjust to capture the moment. I liked his pink hat.

One thing I will say about the Sketchwalks in Toulouse versus the ones in Poznan, the ones this year tended to cover a very large area, a long walk between start and end points, and also they are advertised only to Symposium attendees and not to the general public. That’s two things I will say about the Sketchwalks. I didn’t mind so much the second because the non-registered people found them anyway; there are always a lot of people who come for the ride, who could not get a regular ticket, but are still a big part of the whole Symposium experience and I met a lot of ‘Symposium Fringe’ sketchers, several of my sketching friends did just that. They don’t get the orange lanyard or the yellow bag, but Urban Sketchers did design a special Urban Sketching ID badge this year that people can download and wear even if they are independent sketchers in the whole thing, which is nice. Still, Poznan advertised their Sketchwalks with a lot of advance notice, Toulouse however may have been more conscious of the crowds, and not without reason – that Welcome Sketchcrawl was really over-populated, as was the final one on Saturday, so I can see why. No, my gripe was the long distance covered, and it was like that for all of them. One of the Sketchwalks had an end point over 30 minutes’ walk from the start and when you are sketching and it’s hot, that’s a long way to go for a short event (I walked and timed it, but missed the actual end photo). Just have it closer, focus on one area. This one was a bit of a walk too, but it was at Place du Capitole, right by my hotel, so not as bad. Before heading up there though I stopped to draw the scene above, because I loved all those rooftops. I wish I’d had a higher vantage point, so I could sketch them from above. I drew fast, then dashed up to the end point, where I didn’t miss the photo, I just didn’t join it because I was talking to people. I did a couple more people sketches (the one on the left, below, is of my long-time Urban Sketchers pal Omar Jaramillo, though it’s not very accurate, I was hot and tired. We got a nice photo together after. I declined to go to lunch though as I needed to rest and shower, the Toulouse heat already getting to me. I am glad I did. The next event was later in the afternoon, the Live Demos, and that was a walk back to the Hub and another walk back to the River. I definitely got my steps in in Toulouse.