Ier concurs de dibuix urbà
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When I heard about a urban sketching competition taking place in Barcelona, I signed up immediately!
This is the result of an entire day wandering around Barcelona's Gòtic quarter (OK, actually not all day, but more like from 12h to 19h), gazing intently at places I had already seen before, and examining the unknown ones with a sheer load of curiosity. Also--taking care to avoid being pickpocketed, as the organisers had gone to great lengths to warn us (!!).
The sponsors provided us with a small Moleskine journal and a green BIC ballpen. It was years since I last used a ballpen this colour, and even if I had brought three Faber Castell pens in shades of grey, I decided to use the ballpen too, to add some colour highlights here and there. I think this worked out quite nicely, although I've always had a penchant for green BIC ballpens, so maybe I'm not being too objective here (when in school, I thought they were a nice escape from the scholarly blue/red/black ballpen uniformity, although it enervated teachers when I submitted exams written in green ink, haha!).
The rules for the competition were simple:
- draw only on the provided Moleskine journal
- any choice of materials and techniques
- draw at least five specific places: Plaça Catalunya, Santa Anna's Church, Barcelona's Cathedral, Sant Felip Neri's church, and Santa Maria del Pi church.
Other than that we were free to draw whatever we wanted and as many drawings as we wanted to draw (as long as they all were done on the journal). Sadly the paper was super thin, so I had to leave one page between drawings, and that left me with half of the pages only! At the end I was so energised and "high" on drawing that I even almost ran out of paper! I had to stop drawing random interesting things I found, in order to leave room for the last of the five required subjects :-)
At the end of the day we submitted our sketchbook and waited a week for the jury to choose a winner. After that, winners would be announced and we could recover our sketchbooks. I didn't win anything, but I had lots of fun, made some cool drawings, and discovered interesting places, so what's not to like?