Virtual Art Tours Debut: Pisa
Yesterday we had the FANTASTIC debut of the Virtual Art Tours. This is a completely NEW kind of LIVE online drawing session I came up with where Art Clubbers and I visit a location virtually, and after the tour, sit together to draw parts of the historic monuments we saw.
For the Debut of the Virtual Art Tours, I took the Clubbers to one of the most well known historic sites on Earth: the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Images used with permission according to Google Terms https://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines/
The online tour is exactly that: we start with a virtual tour through the location, and explore the different aspects of that site. In my opinion, it's what makes the drawing session more interesting, because you leave with a souvenir of a site that you actually visited (virtually or in real life).
Images used with permission according to Google Terms https://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines/
Then we selected one of three different details and did a sit down drawing session, based on my lesson Sketching Urban Detail. This lesson is a little different than traditional urban sketching because the point is not to copy an identical replica of what you see, but yet to be INSPIRED by the surrounding details. This greatly removes the pressure of realism, and transforms the drawing into a collaboration between the historic site and the artist.
This next picture shows the interior of the large cathedral next to the Leaning Tower, and I selected the gorgeous golden ceiling as inspiration for our first drawing.
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Interior of the Pisa Duomo (Cattedrale) Joanbanjo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
This is when we switched from tour to drawing session, I showed Clubbers how to select a portion to extract inspiration from the site, how to develop the line-art and embed the work with their own artistry, coloring, hatching and shading.
You can see some of the work in progress of other participants here, while we shared the online session on Zoom. The class had 18 participants, and it was a HIT, such a fun time. This is the first Art Club Virtual Tour of its kind, not only an online session with other artists, but an interactive tour visiting a location that many would not have access to in real life. WHAT FUN!
These live online sessions are available entirely FREE for all members of Art Club, and so is the base lesson Sketching Urban Detail. I'm so pleased with the results that I'm planning many different locations to visit with the Clubbers. The lesson is EXCLUSIVE to Art Club members, but you can read more information about it here:
One of my favorite things to do while traveling is to extract urban details, and then use those details in a Zentangle Inspired piece. This one is from details extracted from the local church in Charlottetown, Canada during my recent trip.