Author

  • Founder of Urban Sketchers, publisher at Sketcher Press and former columnist at The Seattle Times

Sketcher’s World: Drawing in the Arctic, Royal Art, Books

Photo by Raymond Uhlir Sketching in the Arctic When Memphis-based painter and sketcher Elizabeth Alley learned about  a unique artist residency with the Arctic Circle program, her imagination was captured in a surprising way. Sketching on location is crucial to her studio art practice, she says. “I knew if I spent my time sketching during […]

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Reportage News: Sketchers at the Paris Olympics, Calendar and an Important Update

Here are some sketchers who documented the summer Olympic Games in Paris. While none of them was specifically commissioned to be there, their work underscores the unique value of hand-drawn reportage as a visual human record of important events, especially as AI continues to flood social media with machine-generated imagery.

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Reportage News: Delphine Zigoni, Genine Carvalheira, Médar de la Cruz, Bookshelf, Calendar

Drawings to save animals Here’s a great initiative that underscores the value of reportage as a communication and marketing tool. Wildlife artist Delphine Zigoni, 11 other sketchers from USk Paris and journalist Marianne Lagrange recently teamed up to document the life of laboratory animals. They partenered with White Rabbit, a French association that finds homes for the animals when the laboratories […]

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Rewind: Lapin’s journey from drawing Paris commuters to publishing more than 40 books

Lapin’s sketchbook reportage is sought out by municipalities, museums and even the French military. How did he launch his career as an independent reportage artist and urban sketcher? In this new Artist Talk exclusive for On the Spot members, Lapin talks about his career and the strategies behind his success.

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Reportage News: Uganda Sketchbook, The Visual Anthropologist, Urban Sketcher Village in Erlangen

Uganda’s landscape and wildlife in watercolor and pencil “I traveled to Uganda to make one of my dreams a reality: to witness the mountain gorillas.” —Joan León Hot off the press! Barcelona-based sketcher Joan León, the author of Ilustrando Sudamérica*, takes us to a whole new continent in Cuaderno de Uganda ($16.77 on Etsy), a publication he released last […]

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Reportage News: Mereida Fajardo, Joan Chiverton, Chip Sullivan, Luís Simões, plus a new Sketcher Press book!

Hello readers, Here’s a new bulletin of sketching and reportage news. If you like what you read, please share so others can learn about On the Spot and Sketcher Press. Behind the scenes at a London hospital “Vital Organs” is a newly-released 48-page publication collecting the gripping reportage drawings made by Mereida Fajardo at Chelsea […]

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Reportage News: Simo Capecchi in Adesso magazine; Paul Madonna’s All Over Coffee; Substack Reads features On the Spot

Hello readers, Some housekeeping: On the Spot has a new tagline: the Magazine of Reportage Illustration. This slogan better reflects my original goal for the newsletter: to create a reader-supported publication that pays artists for articles of compelling visual storytelling. In light of the new tagline, “Sketching News Roundups” are now called “Reportage News.” These posts will […]

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Rewind: Marielle Durand on drawing inside the French Parliament and around her Paris 13 neighborhood

The guest of my January Live Zoom was Marielle Durand, an artist, author and urban sketcher based in Paris. Durand belongs to a very small group of artists who holds a special pass to draw inside the French Parliament, where she has been documenting political debates since October of 2022. We talked about many things during our […]

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