I experience organising Urban Sketching meetings, a live drawing modality that consists of capturing your personal vision of your immediate world and the places you travel to, for instance, in your sketchbook, making reports of daily events as a visual diary. I was also an organiser of the monthly meetings in Southampton (UK), a gathering of artists of all kinds to draw together and encourage the practice of the Urban Sketchers Manifesto (website).

I love to capture directly from life using a wide range of materials, including ink, crayons, and watercolour on paper. Every place I visit becomes a subject for my work as I capture my experiences in a storytelling mode, focusing on the locations and the people I meet. This selection of sketches is drawn from over one hundred works in my sketchbook, ranging from the Proclamation of the Ascension of Charles III at Buckingham Palace in London to refugee camps in Greece. I believe it is essential to preserve and document, through Reportage Illustration, recordings of buildings, historic moments, and ways of life that are changing or disappearing.

Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Ireland, England, Italy, Scotland, Wales, Greece, Bulgaria, and Poland are some of the countries recorded in my sketchbooks.

“Plein air” is a French term meaning “open air.”

It refers to the practice of painting outdoors, on location, directly in front of the subject — rather than in a studio from memory or photographs. The painter works with natural light, wind, changing shadows, and all the unpredictability that comes with being outside.

The core challenge, and appeal, is that everything is moving: the light shifts, clouds pass, people walk through. You have to make fast decisions and commit. That’s precisely why it connects so naturally to the observation-based practice described in your web copy.

OBSERVATIONAL MISSION

In both Urban Sketchers and Plein Air, observation is the essential starting point for understanding and constructing a scene.

Looking carefully isn’t simply about reproducing an image — it’s about interpreting space, recognising its internal relationships, and translating its atmosphere into something living and meaningful.

Observation develops several capacities at once: spatial perception, visual synthesis, working memory, and decision-making. It forces you to choose what to keep, what to simplify, and what to leave out — so the scene stays recognisable and expressive.

Split-second decisions, made with the fundamental tools of drawing and painting.