West Coast Sketch Crawl, Days 1 & 2: Portrait Party and Balboa Park

8/8/15 California Tower and Museum of Man

Sketching my mandatory gate sketch at San Diego airport this morning, I didn’t want to go home yet! I had so much fun at the Third Annual West Coast Urban Sketchers Sketch Crawl that I wished I could have stayed several more days. Everything you’ve heard about San Diego’s sunny weather is apparently true, and we had the best of it all weekend.

The festivities began Friday evening at a meet-and-greet at Harbor House restaurant. The informal portrait party was a great ice breaker. In addition to meeting lots of new people, I was delighted to be reacquainted with a few sketchers I had initially met at the Barcelona or Paraty symposium. The San Diego team secured an impressive variety of goodies and door prizes from generous sponsors. (I won a box of Koh-i-Noor colored pencils!)

The next day was the first official sketch crawl – a full day at beautiful Balboa Park. After spending eight hours there, I barely scratched the surface of amazing, sketchable architecture, gardens, museums, sculptures, buskers and so much more. The icon of the day for many sketchers was the California Tower and adjacent domed San Diego Museum of Man (I liked that building so much that I sketched the dome a second time). Another popular icon was the Botanical Building. I got the tough architecture out of the way in the morning and spent most of the afternoon relaxing by sketching buskers.

8/8/15 Botanical Building

I think I heard that the official attendance count was 109! During the noon sharing (a second sharing happened at the end of the day), we made two long lines of sketchbooks filled with hundreds of pages of inspired work. To see sketches from all the West Coast Sketch Crawl participants, see the Flickr group.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the Day 3 concluding event at OldTown, plus an ad hoc at the waterfront.

8/7/15 Sea-Tac airport, Seattle

8/7/15 The view of the pool from my lanai at the Sheraton Marina Hotel

8/7/15 I didn't wait until the Portrait Party to start sketching people at my table!

8/7/15 portrait party

8/7/15 portrait party

8/7/15 portrait party

8/8/15 domed top of Museum of Man

8/8/15 Colorful umbrellas at Balboa Park

8/8/15 Big Slim

8/8/15 more buskers

8/8/15 a keyboard busker

One of two rows of sketches during the noon sharing.

The official group photo -- 109 attendees! (photo courtesy of Jim Bumgarner)