Monthly Archives: June 2006

10th international Sketchcrawl! Saturday July 1, 2006

Events, Projects

I just received a reminder email about the International Sketch Crawl which will be on Saturday July 1, 2006. What is a Sketch Crawl you may ask? This is from founder Enrico Casarosa, a talented artist who lives and works in the San Francisco bay area:

The basic idea: to record nonstop everything I could around me with my pencil and watercolors. A drawn journal filled with details ranging from the all the coffee I drank to the different buses I took. After a whole day of drawing and walking around the city the name seemed quite fitting: “SketchCrawl” – a drawing marathon. ….
I soon figured out it was much more interesting to do the marathon with a group of artists instead of all by myself! And so SketchCrawl turned communal. After a whole day of drawing it proved to be amazingly interesting and inspiring to share and compare other people’s drawings and thoughts. Different takes on our surroundings, different details, different sensibilities.
The next step was making the SketchCrawl a World Wide event: having people from different corners of the world join in a day of sketching and journaling and then, thanks to the Internet, having everyone share the results on an online forum.

So why not set up a day of sketching in your home town. The whole event seems very fun and cool. make sure you check out the samples from previous crawls, here is a link to the results of the first time.

AND for those of us who need a kick in the ass to get drawings, here is a perfect excuses to do so, and a great way to see someplace from a different way.

SF Cell Field Trip: Art Materials in Japan Town

Events

First of all let me introduce myself, my name is Brian Kolm and I am part of the San Francisco cell.

On Tuesday, May 30, 2006 was the first field trip for the SF Cell, beyond our regular jam sessions at Café International. Our quest…to buy awesome art supplies in San Francisco’s Japantown.

The three of us who attended first met at the plaza between the two halves of Japantown Center, at 6pm. The plaza is quiet and pleasant, with a fountain and tall tower, as well as interesting areas to sit and sketch.

The Japantown Center is a great place to explore, since there is so much cartoon/art everywhere you turn. There’s the usual cutesy characters like Hello Kitty and action stars like Neruto, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Dragon Ball Z, but also places selling handmade paintings and craft pieces. But we had a goal, to visit the Kinokuniya Stationery & Gift.

Kinokuniya Stationery & Gift is a great store if you like unique art materials, particularly their large selection of brush pens. They have everything from fancy re-fillable brushes to the kind that you can throw away after you’re done. They even had some amazing brush pens filled with brightly colored ink (see image below). The secret is to go to the front counter and ask to try their samples. Then you can see what works best for you.

Kinokuniya Stationery & Gift is also great if you like cute little novelty erasers, interesting containers, origami paper, stickers, and beautiful greeting cards. I particularly liked some of the collectible statues from Studio Ghibli films like Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service.

After we had made our buys, we headed over to the Kinokuniya Bookstore. The place is huge and has pretty much any kind of book or magazine from Japan that you could want. Doc Popular, one of the SF Cell’s founders, lead us to their selection of Deleter comic book supplies.

The Deleter brand of comic book paper is quite good with the smaller sized sheets (with non-repo blue rules) running 40 sheets for $4.60. The aspect is for what they call a Dojinshi/B5 size books, so it’s more square then American size aspect ratio. The paper seems to be a good choice for someone who wants to have the pre-ruled sheets, but does not want to spend a lot of money. It would also be great for kids in cartooning classes. The store also sells the popular markers and pens from Copic.

By this time we were all getting hungry, so we headed to Mifune, a restaurant serving big bowls of noodles or rice topped with tasty treats. The price is reasonable and the environment is cozy. We sat and ate our food and drew a bit with our new pens and paper. What a great way to end our field trip….drawing.

All in all this outing was a lot of fun and our little group agreed that we wanted to plan more events like this. So for those in the San Francisco Bay Area or those visiting, check out the message board or right here at the ol’ blog to see what exciting things are going on.

NOTE: I want to invite my cohorts to comment below on what they bought on this Field Trip and their feelings about them.