Recently, I attended a forum that was especially geared toward educators in Savannah, Georgia. The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) does this every year. At this year’s forum I did a class on sketching outdoors and really got back the joy of sketching!
Most in attendance are art teachers, but there are also educators from business, science, math, social sciences, media, etc. there! We are treated to gallery hops, tours of Savannah, and so much more as entertainment to choose from; however, what we really, truly love are the classes that we take. We are students again and get to choose from an assortment of beautifully creative classes. Any level of ability can participate and enjoy.
People in the Park 
Fountain Nymph 
Study of Fountain Corner 
Fountain in Forsyth Park 
Fountain, Forsyth Park
This year, I selected a class on travel sketching and one on creativity and I wasn’t disappointed. It had been FOREVER since I had regularly sketched and I had started to wonder if my creative juices had dried up. Woo hoo! This got me going again. I’m going to share some of my resources and sketches with you here. Hopefully, you will be as motivated as me!
Getting Started
It’s easy to “bounce” off the page if you haven’t sketched in a while. This is what I mean by “bouncing”. Did you ever start to do something, then think of all of the problems you might have with it? Or a million thoughts go by so fast that you can’t really see them, but you are just too indecisive to get started? You just don’t know where to start? You feel stuck? Creativity is a funny thing.
The way I handled this was to just relax and look. I just sat and looked for a while. Then started drawing. Right and wrong were something that did not exist. In fact, any mark I made was going to be okay. So that’s my efforts for today. Later, I will look at them and think about them. Go draw.
Resources for Sketching Outdoors
Here are a bunch of links that my SCAD teacher gave us. Each will open in its own window, so you can just close to window to come back to this page and see the next one.
Sketchbook Skool with Danny Gregory These are paid courses, but the teacher said they were really good.
Urban Sketchers This site has some great examples of sketching outdoors, city sketching. I personally love looking through them.
They Draw and Travel Another one I totally love looking at. Many examples of personal voice, different ways to approach drawing while traveling.
John Muir Law: Nature Journaling Not urban sketching, but really beautiful nature journaling with LOTS of free resources and how-tos. He makes drawing approachable and easy and I enjoy reading the blog posts.
Jaime Howard’s Blog: Have Brush, Will Travel This is our teacher’s blog. Beautiful resource, fun blog! Highly recommend it.
Sketches on Public Transport I love these! Day to day sketches on the trains/buses by Adebanji Alade. He has video showing his sketchbook and you can hear him talking about them.