USk Basel 2022

photo finale

Symposium Urban Sketchers Switzerland dans la magnifique ville de Bâle.

Mittlere Rheinbrücke

Baustelle

Münster und Basler Fähri

Barfüsserplatz

 

Porträtaustausch mit Inma Serrano

USk Week Intragna

For the second year in a row, Mario Leimbacher urban sketcher and art teacher from Bern, organized a USk week in Switzerland.

Sketchers were invited in Intragna in Centovalli (Ticino) to attend to five whole days of sketching, both workshops and sketchwalks.

 

Mario invited me to join him to lead a workshop with Liz Watkins (London) and my friend Johanna Krimmel (Darmstadt).

 

Mario has renovated a house of the village in which he set up a gallery on the ground floor where we could shelter from the cold and the rain.  

 

The participants were very charming and studious people. I enjoyed a lot these moments, sketching together, walking in the mountains and along the rivers, picking up chestnuts and mushrooms in this beautiful valley.

 We also had a sketchcrawl afternoon in Locarno, at the Major Lake, with the local USk chapter.

I can't wait coming back to Intragna.

 

La Couronne Impériale クラウン インペリアル

"La Couronne Impériale" is inspired by a sketch I made from this series of 4000m peaks in the Swiss Alps in autumn 2017.
The four blocks of this woodcut were carved long before my trip to Japan.
Back home, I found it very interesting to print it. I could benefit from the addition of new knowledge about the printing process. And, not a slight advantage, I had no carving work to do.

The first thing I realized rather than learned in Japan is to make several passes of the same block to intensify a color or a gradient, or simply to correct the badly printed areas. In the example above, I intensify the smooth gradient (kata bokashi 片暈し) with a second pass with a straight line gradient at the top (Itchi Moji Bokachi 一文字暈し).

This first block was used another time to print the orange and yellow trees.

The second block was for the greens.

And was also printed twice in order to darken the foreground sap trees.

The third block is a mauve mountains skyline gradient. Just notice that it covers the light green forest on the slope of the mountain.

This looks obvious on these two pictures on the back of the sheet.

The fourth and last block is a kind of key block.

  It is a multicolor block that needed several passes to control everything.

This print is an edition of 8, used Holbein Watercolors and Kochi Roll paper.
Given that I printed this woodcut after my trip to Japan at the fall 2019, I signed my name in Katakana for the first time.

USk Swiss symposium 2019 in Zuoz

The Swiss Urban Sketchers chapter organised its first symposium in the mountains of the Canton of Graubünden on September 21/22 2019. Thanks to the huge work of few organizers (Mario, André and Heidi) we were host in a magical location: the Lyceum Alpinum of Zuoz. I had the honor of being one of the faculty teachers.

I led two workshops about "mountain sketching" with enthusiasm, in a gorgeous valley under a bright sun. The symposium gathered around fifty people and was a great success. We all hope to meet again next year for such a friendly time.

Les Urban Sketchers de Suisse (principalement Suisse-Allemands) ont organisé leur premier symposium dans les montagnes du canton des Grisons les 21 et 22 septembre 2019. Grâce au travail colossal d'une poignée d'organisateurs (Mario, André et Heidi), nous avons été accueillis dans un lieu magique : le Lyceum Alpinum de Zuoz. J'ai eu l'honneur de faire partie du groupe d'enseignants.

J'ai animé avec enthousiasme deux ateliers de "croquis de montagnes", dans une magnifique vallée sous un soleil radieux. Le symposium, qui a réuni une cinquantaine de personnes, a été une grande réussite. Nous espérons tous nous revoir l'année prochaine pour un moment aussi convivial.

Swiss Urban Sketchers

Urban Sketchers Suisse se fait le relais du projet "carnets d'Anniviers" par la voix de son correspondant valaisan Maurice Perry que j'ai eu le plaisir de croiser lors de la rencontre de carnets de voyages de St Julien en Genevois.
I have the pleasure to see my crowdfunding campaign on USk Switzerland, thanks to Maurice Perry the Wallis' correspondent.
http://switzerland.urbansketchers.org/2016/10/carnets-danniviers.html

Carnets d'Anniviers

The crowdfunding campaign of my watercolor book "Carnets d'Anniviers" is now launched !
I have the pleasure to invite you to fund the printing of this book . You will only have a short month to get your copies of this LIMITED EDITION book (at the special rate of 30€ shipping included) by clicking on :

La campagne de financement participatif du livre d'aquarelles "Carnets d'Anniviers" est lancé. J'ai le plaisir de vous inviter à participer au financement de ce projet. Vous avez un petit mois pour acheter vos exemplaires de ce livre en TIRAGE LIMITÉ au prix préférentiel de 30€ frais de port inclus.

Rendez-vous vite sur :

www.wemakeit.com

Randocroquis Bern

Programmation inédite pour Randocroquis avec la programmation d'un weekend de croquis en Suisse. La première ville choisie fut Berne dont le remarquable centre-ville est classé au patrimoine mondial de l'Unesco. Ces deux journées (2 et 3 juillet 2016) très contrastées au niveau de la météo n'ont pas été de trop pour passer en revue les innombrables sujets proposés par la capitale fédérale. Personnages, architecture, rues avec arcades, petites places et fontaines, vieux quartiers, ponts sur l'Aare et bien sûr… les ours.

Le rendez-vous est déjà pris pour de prochains rendez-vous dans les plus belles villes et les plus beaux cantons. A bientôt la Suisse !

 The Randocroquis organization planned for the first time a weekend workshop (july 2-3) in Switzerland. The first visited city was Bern, the swiss confederation capital.
Despite the contrasted weather between the two days, we had plenty of shelters to sketch or paint under the arcades of the Unesco world cultural heritage site.

This first swiss experience calls other, see you next time people of Switzerland in another beautiful city of your beautiful country.