People from HaTikva Market

Hot Friday morning at the beginning of July - nothing couldn't stop us to meet for the sketchcrawl at the HaTikva Market - small market in the South Tel Aviv.
It's really perfect place for sketching, with plenty of authentic stories, colorful characters, without poses and without air conditioner ;) Yes, it's challenging, but once you got the adrenaline of sketching, you don't care about the heat, the shouts, you simply flow with them.
I started sketching from the entrance to the market - vibrant place where people move non stop, caring their shopping bags - you need to hurry on Friday morning to be ready for the Sabbath evening!

We were sitting opposite to small Shawarma place, so I couldn't not to sketch its owner, chatting with his customers about everything - from politics to arts and everything in between...

After the warm up we dived into the market! I couldn't help not to stop near the beautiful melons-seller, reminding by herself ripe melon ;)  

In the meat place were more reddish atmosphere ;)

Some more sketches from the central avenue of the market - and time was up.

There is nothing better than sketching in the authentic place, were real life is going on. Such a place fascinates me million times more than any fancy aesthetic place, here are people without poses, and stories without poses. I must to come back for more!

All colors of rainbow - sketching at the Pride Parade.

I checked very well that I have a sufficient range of colors in my pencil case before I left to our last sketchcrawl - we decided to go and sketch at the Tel Aviv Pride Parade! I wasn't sure that I'll be able to concentrate, it was possible that this colorful human mess would sweep me away and wouldn't allow me to be in the position of the observer. It took me a while until I pulled off my sketchbook, but once I did, I couldn't stop!
The atmosphere was great, finally nobody cared about the group of people sketching what's going on - anyone around us were more peculiar and strange than we were, and set of colored pencils hanged on my neck looked like a small pride flag.

It was really awesome experience, now I need to wait a whole year until the next time!

Urban Sketchers Tel Aviv occupating Afula!

Here are some sketches I did at the festival of 3D pavement paintings in Afula, where Urban Sketchers Tel Aviv was invited to take a part during Sukkot holidays. It was really nice event, full of colorful events, challenging, but fun!

my first "model" - street artist taking different postures and the audience

Hasidic wild dance

street musicians-kleizmerim 

the view on the bulevard with the 3d painting on the pavement

audience watching one of the street artists in action

It was really fun, different and in fresh Northen atmosphere!

Beach shower models

It's getting hot here! Sitting under the tent near the beach shower and sketching various models changing every few seconds was a perfect chilling action for such a melting days!

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.