I went on my first outing with Urban Sketchers Boulder since this exact time last year. I thought I would be out there more frequently considering I can take the bus, but... as usual... life got in the way. I did return in the end! The group has grown significantly in the past year, which was great to see.

Our meeting point was a clock on The Hill, the commercial neighborhood across the street from CU Boulder. I thought this clock was pretty cool, so I drew it as a warm-up while waiting for people to arrive.

Most people drew on campus because it was hot as hell and campus has trees. Despite this, I ended up spending a considerable amount of time out of the shade to draw the nice view of the Flatirons that you get outside of the student center. This is by far the most ambitious scene I've ever attempted without pencil and I think it turned out! I tried to abide by Citizen Sketcher's post and rail approach to place everything in space.

I ran into the group admin (the only person I knew from last year) while I was wandering around looking for another place to draw, and we found a shady spot with a decent view of The Hill. At this point there were only about 30 minutes until throwdown, but I still wanted to paint something. I pulled out the ultramarine and burnt sienna to minimize the amount of color mixing I'd have to do. I need to work on getting more comfortable using non-realistic palettes, but it's really hard not to copy all the nice colors!

After the throwdown, we debriefed with a little presentation and Q&A about each person's drawing. People were very open to asking and answering questions, and I got a lot of ideas for stuff I want to try later.

For fun and comparison, here's the throwdown from when I went last year. I did the drawing of the tree and the unfinished flower container on the left... at the time, I was fixating on specific objects (mostly trees) and not full scenes, and I was also really fucking slow. Cut to this year and I produced three drawings in about 90 minutes! (I'll talk about this later but the short answer is a lot of practice.)