James Richards

My "Drawing as Discovery" workshops with Utah State's landscape architecture students, faculty and professionals from across the region played to a packed house! The short course included a public lecture, a 3-hour concept sketching session, a 3-hour location sketching session, and a discovery sketch tour of beautiful Logan, Utah. What a spirited, talented group and a happy, positive vibe--hope to see you again soon!

There are a couple of spots left for our "Sketching Lively Townscapes" workshop, July 17-20, in Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK. Yes, this is the week before the International Sketching Symposium in Amsterdam, where I'll be teaching 3-hour workshops. It's a great warm-up for the symposium, and/or an in-depth dive into my working methods. Our workshop in neighboring Oxford last summer was great fun; we're looking forward to returning to the UK.

But I'd been intrigued by the fact that many schools of architecture in the U.S. once required at least one life drawing course, and now very few did. I'd spoken with a successful glass sculptor in New Orleans, who'd shown me his incredible sketchbooks, and told me that his creative search for form "all goes back to life drawing." Regardless of our creative focus, life drawing skills can help us create work that rooted in our own intuitive humanity, and so strikes us as believable and true, and that other human beings can relate to and empathize with. Earlier this week, I thumbed through those life drawing sketchbooks that I filled studying with the brilliant teacher Michael O'Keefe at his studio in Richardson, Texas.