Limited palettes, for today and for Chicago

I’m very excited to be returning to Chicago this spring to teach at the Chicago Sketch Seminar. If you don’t know much about this event, the organizers call it a Symposium-like experience but on a much smaller scale. This year there will be 18 workshops, designed for all levels of sketchers — beginner to advanced — and the home base for the three-day event is the American Academy of Art on Michigan Avenue.

My workshop is called “Bare Bones: Exploring Limited Palettes in Watercolour“. It’s a workshop that I first taught at the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Manchester, UK, in 2016. This time we’ll be exploring new ways of working with colour, with the beautiful skyline of Chicago as inspiration. Dates of the Seminar are May 31-June 2, 2019, and registration opens this Saturday, March 16 at 10 am CST.

With limited palettes on my mind, I went out sketching in Pointe Claire Village today. The warmer weather is on the way and the snow is melting quickly. I wanted to sketch the watery reflections of the traffic signs in the wet street but a car parked in front of me after my drawing was done so much the colour was done from memory. Limited palette was Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Blue, Quin Rose and Quin Gold.