Meet Barbara Weeks! Workshop 4:Watercolor: Focused, Fast, and Fun

Barbara Weeks received her BFA from St. John’s University in New York and has been fortunate to work in the field of art in many capacities ever since.

As Vice President of Design and Production in the magazine publishing industry, she oversaw the design and production of three monthly magazines as well as corporate promotional pieces. In 2005 she took that experience and founded Remarque Design, LLC, a company dedicated to fine art, illustration, and design services. Barbara loves the variety of projects she has completed at Remarque, such as series of watercolor illustrations for a national children’s ballet school, a Christmas storybook, logos for businesses large and small, and invitations, advertisements and brochures for Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago.

Barbara is a member of the Illinois Watercolor Society, Urban Sketchers, and Urban Sketchers Chicago. She has been an administrator for USk Chicago since the beginning and was one of the three local administrators for the 2017 International Urban Sketchers Symposium in Chicago. To help celebrate Urban Sketchers tenth anniversary, Barbara acted as the Chicago organizer for 10Years-10Classes. She is a monitor of a monthly sketch group at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago  and an online mentor at Sketchbook Skool. She serves as a master docent at Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA)

Introducing Amy Larsen! Workshop 3: Sketching on the iPad with Procreate and the Apple Pencil

Amy Larsen has been drawing and painting since the 1970’s. She is mainly interested in watercolor and pen and ink, but she has also explored other media including markers, pastel, oil paint, and currently, the iPad.  Amy’s work consists of portraits, botanicals and landscapes. She has been an active member of the Urban Sketchers Chicago group since its founding. 

Amy is also a freelance graphic artist. She is an alumni of the School of the Art Institute (2015) and has attended seminars by award-winning watercolor artists David Taylor and Rose Edin among others. 

Meet Mark Jones! Workshop 13 Go BOLD with Color Pencils

Mark Jones is an architect in Chicago with over 30 years of experience.  He graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago, learning drawing and sketching skills in architecture classes.  His professors emphasized the importance of documenting the environment by requiring students to maintain a sketchbook.  Mark kept an active sketchbook, filling it with ideas, inspirational quotes and designs as well as using it as a journal.  He spent his junior year studying abroad in Versailles, France and while there, documented his travels throughout Europe in pencil sketches and watercolors.  Mark was subsequently drawn to the medium of color pencils and has used it predominantly since.

Mark continues to keep active sketchbooks, filling them with urban sketches, conceptual drawings, doodles, journaling and anything else that inspires him. He routinely utilize freehand drawing to develop project designs and details in his work and always encourages the younger architectural staff to draw by hand and sketch.

Mark was an exhibitor at the 2018 OUTside the PRACTICE – Artworks Created by Architects and Designers exhibit at the Bridgeport Arts Center.  He is a member of the American Institute of Architects, the Construction Specification Institute and resides on the northwest side of Chicago.

Introducing Nishant Jain! Workshop 14: Be Sneaky: Sketching People To Liven Your Urban Landscape

Nishant Jain is a writer and cartoonist, having fallen into both professions quite accidentally. He grew up in India and studied to be an engineer.  As he earned a Master’s degree (Mechanical Engineering), Nishant was writing stories and drawing a stick figure comic to a growing online audience. 

When he first visited Chicago, Nishant was inspired by the city’s creative vibe – the jazz, the blues, and the tenacity of its aspiring stand-up comics, musicians and artists. Half-way through his PhD (in Neuroscience), Nishant quit academia to pursue the life of a full-time writer/cartoonist. Flying to a new life in Chicago, he realized that it was time to learn to really draw. Thus began an obsession with Urban-Sketching and Sneaky Art.

In the years since, Nishant has made hundreds of webcomics to an audience of over 30,000 followers, written scripts for political satire shows on Indian television, drawn graphic novels, fulfilled over a dozen private commissions, and displayed his art at multiple galleries. Urban-sketching has given him a way to appreciate the world around him, even when he feels like a stranger in a strange land. Sneaky Art is his way of finding beauty around him, even when he’s alone.  Nishant lives in Eau Claire (WI) with his wife, listens to jazz, and thinks too much.

Meet Paul Heaston! Workshop 15: Umbrella Perspective, Chicago Style!

Paul Heaston received a BFA in painting from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2002 and an MFA in painting from Montana State University in 2008. He first started sketching in 2007 during a semester abroad in Perugia, Italy. Rather than continue making oil paintings, he opted to bring along a Moleskine sketchbook and document his travels around Italy. Since then he has filled over 100 sketchbooks and completed multiple long term sketching projects. He has been a part of the Urban Sketchers community since the very beginning.

Paul has taught sketching workshops and demos at the USk Symposiums in Paraty, Manchester, Chicago and Porto. Additionally, he has taught painting and drawing in Montana, Texas and Colorado, and has been a visiting artist and lecturer at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, Mesa State University in Grand Junction, Colorado and the University of Wyoming in Laramie. His work has been featured in several books about urban sketching and drawing and his sketches have been shown in exhibitions in Colorado, Texas, Montana, Oklahoma and New York City. Paul’s sketches can be viewed online on Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram where he has over 200 thousand followers. Paul lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife Linda and two daughters.

Say hello to Alex Zonis! Workshop 2: Fountain Pen World

Alex Zonis is a Chicago-based visual artist, an oil painter, and an Urban Sketcher.  As a painter, she participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions such as Oil Painters of America and International Guild of Realism. Her work can be found in private collections in USA, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Israel.

Alex is a contemporary realist painter working in oil paints.  Her artistic inspirations come from Dutch masters techniques, Caravaggio’s light handling, and Russian narrative painting.  She teaches Indirect Oil Painting in her studio in Chicago.

Alex is a founder of Urban Sketchers Chicago and has worked as one of the chapter admins since the beginning. She is proud to see the chapter grow from 4 people in 2012 to 1000+ members today. Alex has organized 4 Chicago Sketch Seminars starting in 2014 and is managing planning for the 2019 Seminar.  Alex was also the main local organizer for 2017 International USk Symposium in Chicago

Alex loves sketching on location and the community of artists that came together to share the joy, adventures and camaraderie that is Urban Sketching.  She hopes to share her love for sketching with fountain pens and inks and the romance of the old world mark-making tools through the Fountain Pen World workshop.

Say hi to Shari Blaukopf! Workshop 17: Bare Bones: Exploring Limited Palettes in Watercolour

Shari Blaukopf is a Montreal-based painter, graphic design teacher, illustrator and art blogger. She has a BFA from Concordia University with a specialization in graphic design, but her true love has always been watercolour painting. She began painting in her teens and is fortunate to have studied with some of the greats: Edgar A. Whitney, Frank Webb, Skip Laurence, Milford Zornes and Frederick Wong.  

Shari is a co-founder of Urban Sketchers Montreal and has given many watercolour workshops both on her own and through the Urban Sketchers Workshop Program in Montreal, Galway, New York, Portland, Barcelona, Singapore, Manchester, Chicago and Porto. Her book, “The Urban Sketching Handbook: Working with Color,” will be published by Quarry Books in spring 2019.  Shari grew up and still lives in Montreal, where she continues to discover neighbourhoods in her quest to find the best streets and back alleys to sketch.  

Shari is a signature member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour and a member of the Lakeshore Association of Artists.  You can find her online courses, Sketching Landscapes and Sketching the City, on Craftsy.com. Her watercolours are in corporate, government and private collections in Canada, the United States and in other countries.

Meet Wes Douglas!  Workshop 18: Urban Uglies: How to Make Beautiful Sketches Out of Those Areas Most People Overlook

Wes Douglas is an award-winning art director, illustrator and co-founder of the Elmhurst-based innovation agency Maddock Douglas, Inc. In addition to his creative role at Maddock Douglas, Wes also developed “Speaker Sketches” (his unique creative meeting notes which blend hand-written words and sketched pictures), concept visualizations, and package designs. He is also the primary book illustrator for the Amazon best-seller Free The Idea Monkey (to focus on what matters most) by Mike Maddock. Wes has been a co-admin for the Chicago chapter of Urban Sketchers since 2013.

Wes loves to share what he has learned about sketching and has a lot of fun in the process. In the summer of 2017, as part of his public relations duties, Wes appeared on WGN Morning News and WGN Radio AM 720 “Outside the Loop” programs to share his passion of urban sketching with Chicago listeners and to promote upcoming Sketch Seminars and the 8th International Urban Sketchers Symposium.

Wes has also lead demonstrations on urban sketching people for the DuPage Art League in Wheaton, a demonstration on marker illustration at the American Academy of Art, and will soon be leading a demonstration on urban sketching people at the Kishwaukee Valley Art League in Sycamore.

Say hello to Aaron Elswick! Workshop 1: Fake It Till You Make It: Sketchin’ Like You Don’t Care

Aaron is a Chicago-based Urban Landscape Architectural Designer and Urban Sketcher. A Kentucky native, his passion and curiosity lies at the intersection of science, art and design. His favorite places to visit and draw are all full of life and color, and range from dense and urban to vast and natural environments. To better design such types of places in his professional career, he seeks them out in his free time to explore their beauty via his sketchbook. With his approach, the drawing process is utilized to gain understanding, insight, and at times, inspiration.

Drawing is the tool and the language Aaron uses in his career to communicate, explore ideas, and to design cities of the future. Urban Sketching is how he practices. He has added mediums to his urban sketching throughout the years, but his objective has remained the same – to capture what he sees as fast and legibly loose as possible.

Becoming a member of USk Chicago has had a tremendous impact on Aaron’s life, both personally and professionally. The art of urban sketching can only be described as beautiful, and he’s looking forward to sharing it with everyone who attends his workshop.