Paula Lourenço sketching

#10 anos dos USKPortugal

Yes, it’s today the big meeting of Portugal urban sketchers and I’m at it. 😜👋🤓✍️✍️🎊

The all organization of the event was perfect and I was one of those who received a bag with goodies. 👏#10 anos dos USKPortugalthat’s me in yellow#10 anos dos USKPortugal

the wonderful goodies I’ve got .

my first sketch at the door of the event and the stamp of it.#10 anos dos USKPortugal

we went sketching at a beautiful village of workers at Lisbon named Villa Bertha and this is my sketching gear of the day.

After we went to a belvedere at another place of Lisbon I managed to guest some help from a tuk tuk driver who offered himself to hold my sketchbook for the photo 👏#10 anos dos USKPortugaland this sketch was baptized with drops of rain and 🍻 beer that was turned off by the wind. Well, everything can happen on the wild 😜.#10 anos dos USKPortugal

me and #10 anos dos USKPortugalNelson Paciência and Nelson Polzin #10 anos dos USKPortugal

#10 anos dos USKPortugal

My trip to South Portugal – Algarve

Those are my pomegranates from my front yard lost on the Algarve hillsthe litle church of Cachopo- Tavira at the Praia-Verde beach after a visit to a village near by. Was so hot and I needed fresh air.what better to eat on a hot, hot day. This is real Portuguese summer food and I so love it lost on the hills with my litle dog I sat and sketch the view

Drive and sketch

Love to drive and love to sketch. This time I drove further south, almost to the frontier with Spain and stop at this beautiful litle town of salt pans and white houses, Castro Marim, for a sketch.

From the Algarve hills to the seaside 🙂

Stillman & Birn square sketchbook, white nights watercolors.

Sketching in the wild 😜

Just drove from Lisbon to Algarve/Portugal , stop up on the hills for a sketch under 35 degrees Celsius. A girl gota do what she gota do …

Reviewing Stillman & Birn square sketchbook

I finally got this sketchbook on my hands, after being sold out everywhere online. I want it so badly that I wrote to mr. Stillman on Facebook and asked him to put it back available at Amazon or eBay or anywhere else and he answered me ! He advised me a French online shop where they have some sketchbooks available. Great, a shop on the same continent as me! So now I have three of these sketchbooks to fill with daily sketches. Yay! They are Beta series, premium sketchbooks, dry and wet media, watercolor and ink , soft cover and they are square. Paper inside is high quality for watercolors (270 gsm), cold press which makes a wonderful soft texturized surface paper , I love it. The square format ( 19x19cm ; 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches) it’s a lovely compromise between an A4 and an A5 sketchbook, it allows you to compose different sketches on the same page , something I couldn’t do on a A5 format.

At Sintra on a beautiful cool day . I walked almost 2 km just to sketch that castle, only possible because was such a fresh day.

A picnic at the forest and time to sketch again

At Oeiras harbour with my new pen, Confucius fude

Let’s go etching today

my daily routine before going to Lisbon for the etching studio.

Why all the fuzz about sketchbooks

I started sketching on cheap plain white pages sketchbooks. At that time my sketchbooks were a mix of planners and sketchbooks , I put everything on it, stamps, addresses, phone numbers , sculpture projects, collages, reminders, you name it , I sketched with the same pen or pencil I wrote. But one day I bought a watercolor case at Venice/Italy and then visiting Toscanny , I tried to use watercolor on my sketch of the leaning tower of Piza and it was a disaster, I had to start the sketch again because the paper waved so much and was so soggy that I had to eliminate the page.

Cheap plain sketchbook, black fineliner pen and color pencil

Bic pen o n A5 cheap sketchbook

Back to Venice I bought a wire bound , 170gsm, Canson sketchbook but still I didn’t like the paper too absorbent , and too thin, it waves with the watercolors, and that wire and all those holes made the pages very easily detachables. Anyway I fulfilled it until the last page. After that I bought all available watercolor sketchbooks brands ( as you can see on my previous article on my blog) after all I need my gear work with me , not against me. That’s why all the fuzz about sketchbooks.