New Book, New Blog!!

Welcome to the new blog!!!! With the release of the new book, #6 in the series, The Urban Sketching Handbook: 101 Sketching Tips, it seems a good time to move to WordPress… it should be easier to sign up to receive posts via email (and I hope everyone will sign up!!), it has a cleaner look, and you can find a list of workshops and much more info.

I’m so thrilled to share this new book!! It’s chock full of well over 101 tips, tricks, techniques, and “handy hacks” to help you up your sketching game. I love teaching and have done it for so long, I’ve figured out simple ways to explain complicated subjects…things like “think of stairs like a wedge of cheese”, or “towers are like wedding cakes”… in fact, Watercolor Artist magazine has featured nearly an entire chapter in their current edition, calling the book “awesome” and “a really good one”!

The concept for the book first started as a series of 10 blog posts featuring several “how-to tips” for those going to the Urban Sketchers symposium in Porto, which I did not attend (I went to AsiaLink in Taiwan instead). I kept waking up in the middle of the night, grabbing my phone, and adding more tips to the list. When I started getting up to about 150, I realized there might actually be a book here, so I contacted my editor, Mary Ann Hall. She saw the posts and said, yes, it looks like a book!! And so I embarked on attempting to edit down a list of about 250 tips…

101 Sketching Tips also features 47 amazing, and I mean amazing, sketchers from around the world. These are folks I hope you will follow on Instagram and Facebook, their info is in the back of the book. After teaching in Taiwan last year, I realized I wanted to include more Asian sketchers in addition to more folks that are new to the books in the series. So look for lots of new names, new talent, from places like India, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Honk Kong, South Korea, and Singapore…and Europe, Australia, North and South America too!

I hope everyone finds something new and eye-opening in this book, and maybe you’ll learn to see things in new ways. If you find the book in your local bookstore, please snap a photo and post it on Instagram, and tag me at @stephanieabower so that I see it. I would LOVE to see how far this book goes!!