Welcome to On the Spot!

Your guide to great urban sketching and reportage illustration

Instagram, TikTok, Twitter… It’s hard to keep up with artists’ feeds on social media.

Let me be your guide to new and relevant sketchers’ content so you can get over the fear of missing out.

Every other week, I will send you a brief report highlighting important work by talented sketchers who are pushing the boundaries of their craft.

My name is Gabriel Campanario. I’m a Spanish-American journalist, author and urban sketcher living in the greater Seattle area. Moving here in 2006 rekindled my interest in drawing. That changed my life in many ways.

I founded Urban Sketchers, a global organization of artists who aim to “show the world, one drawing at a time” through on-location sketching and reportage. I wrote the award-winning newspaper column “Seattle Sketcher,” which appeared in The Seattle Times between 2009 and 2021. I authored “The Art of Urban Sketching” and kicked off “The Urban Sketching Handbook” series with titles on how to draw cityscapes and people. Currently, I’m taking steps to launch Sketcher Press, an independent publisher specializing in urban sketching, reportage illustration and documentary and journalistic drawing.

If you are an urban sketcher, you know that drawing on the spot can be a lot of fun, even therapeutic. But it can take a lot of effort when you are trying to do your best work and get a fair compensation for it as a professional or aspiring full-time artist. Making and selling great drawings, writing good blog posts, publishing a book, sketching an event for a magazine — these are no easy assignments.

This is why I’m launching On the Spot now:

🎉 To celebrate work by fellow urban sketchers and reportage illustrators who are creating remarkable on-the-spot sketching and storytelling.

👊🏻 To build a support network for artists interested in documenting places, people and culture through observational drawing at a professional level.

💬 To create a forum of discussion about on-the-spot drawing as a journalistic medium.

⏰ To save you time from keeping up with the fire hose of posts on social media.

If this sounds like something you’ll be interested in, I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

Have suggestions for the newsletter? Email me at gabi@sketcherpress.com

Thanks for reading!