Singapore USk Symposium - part 3 - A Collective Reportage

I owe to myself one last post about Singapore USk Symposium. Unfortunately, I din't have a time to take many workshops, because all my mornings I was busy by teaching. The only one that I managed to take, was Simo Capecchi's "A Collective Reportage" workshop. I'm interested a lot in reportage and storytelling aspect of urban sketching, and it was a long time I wanted to take Simo's workshop, one of the specialists of reportage drawing.
It was very interesting to hear Simo's introduction, in which she told about different approaches to the reportage drawing and showed a lot of examples - her own sketches and also other artist's works. Then our mission was defined and we went to make our reportage about the Chinese Temple at Waterloo Street.
I had with me my self-made accordion sketchbook, which construction dictated me the character of my reportage - repetitive compositions, with minimal texts, capturing all kind of people - vendors, temple servers, security guards, and, of course, the prayers.

It was a great experience, the small conclusions and comprehensions will continue to drop-down in my mind all the time, while I'm sketching.
I miss Singapore and its terrific atmosphere, but all this great experience will continue to echo inside me!

Singapore USk Symposium - part 2

I'm continuing my first post about the amazing experience of Singapore USk Symposium. Teaching our workshop "Face the City!" together with my friend from Denmark Ea Ejersbo was, of course, the main reason for coming there. Ea spent the last winter in Israel, near me, and then born our idea of leading a workshop together again. As our mutual favorite sketching subject is people, the starting point was easy to choose. We even did a rehearsal of our workshop in Jaffa for the local Urban Sketchers group. But, of course, doing it in Singapore, for the international audience, as part of the USk symposium, was a different experience!
Certainly, it's impossible to learn sketching people in three and a half hours, and even in there and a half days. Nothing can't exchange her majesty practice, but still, it's possible to transfer our approach to sketching people, and even maybe to the urban sketching in general. I don't fancy perfect step-by-step recipes of a perfect sketch. For me the way is not less important than the result. Lets's say, the way is what really matters, the final sketch is a nice by-product result. In our workshop the main emphasis was on trying to look better, observing, searching for the stories to tell. First of - what you want to tell, and only after - how. To make it easier, we broke our workshop into three exercises. In first one, called "Capture Emotions", we asked the participants to look around for people with recognizable facial expressions and try to capture them.

In second one, "Capture Action" - to pay attention to the body language, which can tell us a lot without words.

In the final exercise we asked to put our "heroes" in their surrounding and tell us a story, using our ability to capture emotions and feeling through facial expressions and body language.

The results were really wonderful, but most important, we saw the participants overcoming invisible barrier, making step out of their safe zone and really enjoying the process!

I enjoyed it very much! Here are some sketches done on the workshop's spot, checking it before and while doing the demonstration.

I'm grateful for the opportunity of being a part of so great team of Symposium's instructors, also because teaching is the best way to learn!
Here is the link where you can download our workshops' flyer.

Singapore USk Symposium - part 1

A few weeks passed since I'm back from Singapore. It was my third USk Symposium and I tried to prepare myself to the experience, but of course it didn't help. I remember myself thinking during the Symposium - "try to freeze the moments! try to keep the feeling in your memory!" But everything comes to its end, and here I'm, with my photos, souvenirs and the most precious, my sketchbooks - all that left after this amazing week!
Singapore itself, with its super kind and friendly citizens, plus all the local organizers of the Symposium, gave me a feeling of home. Meeting the international sketchers gang felt to me like the classmates reunion - it was so great meeting old friends, and getting know in person new ones, hanging out together, chatting, drinking & eating, and, of course, sketching! I was honored to be a part of the Symposium faculty, so very fun and special teaching experience added to all the others, I will write about it in my next post.
Finally I scanned my big Singapore sketchbook, so I'll start with sharing here some its sketches, you can find the entire Singapore book on Flickr.

Will be continued!

Singapore - here I come!

One week is left until the beginning of the USk 2015 Symposium in Singapore, and I'm very excited toward the trip! I'm honored to be one of the instructors of the symposium, I will lead together with my friend from Denmark Ea Ejersbo a workshop dedicated to sketching people in action.
It'll be my third symposium, and even if I'm more or less prepared for this celebration of sketching, for meeting sketchers all over the world - old friends and sketchers I never met in person - you never know what surprises are waiting for you during this 3 crazy days. In addition, it's my first visit in Singapore, so I think my excitement is understandable :)
Here are fresh giveaways I collected today from the printers - looking forward to give them to my old and new friends-sketchers!

After collecting the goodies in Tel Aviv, I met my fellow sketcher Nathan and we spent a few hours by... some sketching, as you could guess!
I drew the two first sketches with my new pastel pencils - tool that still I need to learn to work with, but I love the feeling of being unsure with the new tool, it always lead me to the new directions!

I allowed to myself to relax in the last sketch with my favorite - graphite pencil!

Singapore, here I (and my sketchbook) come!