Staying cool in Amsterdam

I’ve just returned from Amsterdam and a busy week of teaching at the 10th annual Urban Sketchers Symposium. Besides teaching three workshops and giving one demo, I spent time sketching with old friends, meeting new ones and trying to survive the record-breaking heat wave that descended on Europe for a few crazy days.

When I teach, I always try to arrive at the location a day or two early to look at locations, plan where demos will be and find sheltered spots in case of rain. But in my plans for Amsterdam, it never occurred to me to me that I might be teaching in 98°F weather. For three or four days Amsterdam was an oven, and that made teaching (and learning) difficult for everyone.

An urban sketchers symposium is an event that requires stamina. Lots of it. There are workshops every morning, sketchcrawls in the afternoon, and “drink and draw” events in the evening. Add a heat wave to that and energy soon runs out even for the hardiest of sketchers. After my first workshop I reduced the number of exercises for participants from three to two, because I found that people just did not have the energy required to move from place to place in the heat. In talking to other instructors, I found out many of them did this as well. Fortunately, all of our workshops were in the morning so we were able to get some good sketching in before the worst heat of the day.

Despite the tough conditions, people smiled their way through the three days. Witness the big smiles of the three groups I taught in the photos below. I have always said that urban sketchers are a hardy bunch. We are used to sitting on the sidewalk to draw, being outside in the rain, sketching in cold weather and dealing with curious onlookers, so why should this be any different? Just another sketching day in Amsterdam.

We sketched at Amsterdam’s Historic Harbour, where there is not much shade to be found. We hid in the shadiest spaces we could find.

In my three-hour workshop, I shared my love of drawing and painting boats and their reflections, first with a black brush pen and then with paint. As you can see, the skill level at a symposium is very high! Amazing work was produced all three days.

During the symposium, three correspondents moved from workshop to workshop (there were over 30 in all), sketching what they saw and writing about it in blog posts each day. Orling Dominguez sat in on a bit of my workshop on the first day, sketching what she saw and using a brush pen just like we were doing. I just love the sketch she did, and you can read the full post here as well as other posts by Gwen Glotin and Mark Alan Anderson.

The final afternoon of the symposium is always a gathering in some central meeting spot where everyone sketches together and then makes their way to a spot for a group photo. Although there were about 500 registered participants in the event, many more came to Amsterdam to hang out and sketch. The photo is evidence of just how many were there. Can you spot me in there?

At the closing ceremonies, the big announcement is always the location of next year’s event. If you haven’t already heard, it’s Hong Kong!

For an event of this size to run smoothly (and it did!), it takes so many volunteers (you can see them in the photo in red t-shirts) to do all the planning, scout locations, accompany instructors to workshops, sell raffle tickets and solve problems. I send out a big thank you to all of them for the countless hours that they put in to make this happen. It was a spectacular event in the perfect city for sketching.