The challenge to sketch one hundred people in five days is the brainchild of artists Marc Taro Holmes and Liz Steel, who jumpstarted the initiative seven years ago. During this week, thousands of amateur and pro artists worldwide line up beside them to sketch people, live or from reference photos. It doesn’t matter, as long as you keep the stream going, putting out as many sketches of people as you can, and posting them online to share with the wider community.

Next saturday, April 18th, at 5pm (GMT+1), I will open my watercolor and sketchbook exhibition, live streaming from my home, on Instagram.

Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

March: Baccalà / Março: Bacalhau

This is one of the thousand ways Portuguese have of cooking cod fish, and happens to be my favorite. Gather the ingredients: cod fish, potato, chickpeas, carrots, egg and a choice of your preferred greens (broccoli). Boil everything and serve soaked in olive oil and vinegar. Garlic optional. Simple, effective and tasty!

Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

February: Waterfront / Fevereiro: Beira-mar

The waterfront of Lisboa, on the Tejo river, is 17km long, but for many years, most of it was only partially accessible and difficult to get to. Between shipping containers, port equipment and the railway line along the shore towards the ocean, just a few spots were available to promenade. Nowadays, the city is improving its relationship with the river, and giving the waterfront back to its citizens.

Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

January: Narrow streets / Janeiro: Ruas estreitas

Have you ever lived in an apartment where you could handshake your neighbor from the building across the street? Or even collect their hanging clothes? Narrow streets are a feature of the old parts of both Genova and Lisboa, sometimes even coupled with stairs. In Lisboa, the narrowest alleys can be find the old districts of Castelo, Alfama and Mouraria.

Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

For the next 12 months, Valentina Raiola and I will share with the world the similarities between Genova and Lisboa, through sketches and text, in our blogs and social media. We will each post one sketch per month, each one based on a theme that connects both cities. Think Inktober but less frantic and establishing a bridge between two places and two people.

I saw flashbacks from the 2011 Lisbon Symposium, which, at a distance, looked really tiny. I saw these past ten years that changed my life completely, and I saw the main role that the urban sketchers had in that change!

The all-female media producers EVA are showing the life and work of a few Portuguese Urban Sketchers, in the short Youtube-based webseries Urban Sketchers Journals. Each short episode shows a sketcher in their element, speaking their mind about materials, attitudes and subjects of choic

Vila Berta, in Graça, became a phenomenon, a few years back, by bringing to the festivities an audience that wasn’t used to partake in them, and by becoming one of the most known hubs of the fest in the city.

Carina was lucky to book her time in Lisboa during the Santos, the city festivities. That usually means sketching drunk among heaps of people, ending the night smelling like sweat and grilled sardines – It was a blast of course!

More than a year has passed since these sketches were done. They’re a month apart and are the records of a great year to be a sketcher in Lisboa. In a partnership with the Lisboa, Capital Ibero-americana da Cultura program and the Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, the Urban Sketchers Portugal was able to bring to the city several sketchers from Portugal, Spain and Latin America for a season of lectures and workshops.

With our workshop (Pedro Alves and I) coming up in a few weeks, I start to get excited about this night sketching business! It’s really easy, and at the same time really challenging to sketch after hours. The easy aspect of it, and the most pedagogic part about it, is that your palette gets reduced to a couple, three at most, colors.

During our lunchtime, Pedro Alves and I, inadvertently, took Richard Aitken, the garden expert, to one of the least gardeny parts of Lisboa – the densely packed Castle district – for a sketch from above.

It was one of those weeks when Lisboa becomes a hub for sketchers around the world.

Female models have to convince the brides in the audience that they’ll look as beautiful as the models during their special day. They dash through the runway in their high heels, winking and flirting with the audience, arching their backs in an almost impossible way, still looking as natural as can be.

Last weekend, the Lisboa Makeup School students had their final course exam. Nine talented girls led by the amazing makeup artist Miguel Molena spent the whole Sunday working their way into the makeup world in a basement of an office building in the central Avenida da Liberdade.

The agricultural area north of Lisboa is known as região saloia, a term that nowadays in commonly used to refer people in rural areas, but that has a very particular origin

For my third class as instructor in the Urban Sketchers 10 Years x 10 Classes programme in Lisboa, we went to Campo de Ourique market, a small and cozy building, in an uptown district, that underwent a deep renovation a few years ago, and is now a posh destination to eat and drink in the city.