Sketching with the USK Netherlands

The Urban Sketchers Netherlands organised a sketchcrawl in Maastricht last December. Since the city is about 2 hours away by car, some of us sketchers from Luxembourg decided to go and join them for the day.

I arrived just in the nick of time for a workshop help by René Fijten. The idea of the workshop was to document a place going from the general feeling to a detail. René is a great teacher and he was kind enough to translate everything for the non Dutch speakers so we could all benefit from the exercise as much as possible.

For the first exercise, René asked us to sketch the general view of our meeting place, describe it as we saw it. Was it a busy place? a small location? etc.

Then we stopped at a passage. Again: what were our impressions?

We then had to choose one of the facades that were more interesting to us and document it.

And finally, finish with a small detail.

I found this approach very interesting and a good exercise to keep in mind when sketching outside. I think it would make for a very interesting composition on a big double page, for example.

After the workshop, and after lunch, I joined other sketchers at the bookstore Dominicanen, an old church re-purposed as a library and a gorgeous place.

There were tons of great spots to sketch in there, but I decided to challenge myself with a birds-eye view over the hundreds of clients on the lower floor.

It was such an interesting viewpoint that I did a second sketch, this time focusing only on the people. So much can be said about a place merely through the body language of the people there!

Only too soon it was time to share all the sketches and for the group photo. The USK Netherlands made a great little clip documenting the sketchcrawl.