Wellysketch 2027

Wellysketch is a celebration of urban sketching - drawing our capital city on location.
Sketchwalks and drink and draws are free events, more details on those later.

We are also running workshops with three instructors:
Richard Briggs (Sydney), Peter Rush (Sydney) and Uma Kelkar (California)

Workshops will be on Saturday 23, Sunday 24 and Monday 25 January, from 9 am until 12 noon.
Tickets go on sale on Sunday 26 July at 12 noon. To get notified, follow USk Wellington on Humanitix https://events.humanitix.com/host/urban-sketchers-wellington

Information about the workshops:
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Hillside Panoramas with Uma Kelkar
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Sweeping hillside and harbour views can feel overwhelming — but they don't have to be. In this watercolour- based workshop, we'll use pattern recognition and direct watercolour to break far-off panoramas — houses stacked on hills, distant city, harbour beyond — into simple, repeatable shapes. Learn to confidently tackle any wide view, one pattern at a time.

Ever stood at a Wellington lookout with only 30 minutes to capture houses tumbling down the hillside and the harbour stretching beyond? This workshop gives you the tools to confidently sketch expansive panoramas using direct watercolour and pattern recognition. You'll learn to spot the colour "braids" that unify a sprawling view — structure, foliage and shadow — and paint them as flowing, interconnected shapes.

Think like a printmaker, paint like a watercolourist, and create panoramas that read clearly and vibrantly. These techniques won't only simplify hillside cityscapes; they'll unlock your ability to sketch other complex subjects — landscapes, markets and beyond.

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Urban drama with Peter Rush
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Explore urban sketching's dynamic potential to embrace the energy and drama of city life. Sketch freely on found cardboard boxes with pen and colour pencils, emphasising spirit over perfection. Capture the vitality of busy streets, to create immersive, vibrant drawings.
In this workshop the intention is to draw freely and release some inhibitions to reflect all the drama and dynamics of city life.
We will be sketching urban spaces on the reverse side of found cardboard packaging. The tone and texture of these boxes enhances colour pencil drawing. Also the mechanical form of the box perfectly expresses our urban world.
We will let our hands go free, do our best to get away from the carefully rendered line. With pen and pencil we will quickly draw the busy urban spaces we encounter.
We will observe urban space and draw everything in it. - more energy, more lines, to allow your spirit and character to show in your sketching - the intention is not to look at objects in isolation, it is to see that everything is interconnected. To capture the mood and energy of a place.
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Slicing up the street with Richard Briggs
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The main aim of this workshop is to encourage a way of looking at your surroundings and being playful with how you draw them.
In this workshop we look at how different scales in a drawing can encourage a focused approach to understanding of place. We will observe a street in Wellington and do a range of line-based drawings of from different views, and these will be done at different scales but on the same sized paper.
Imagine you are eyes are the lens of a camera, and you zoom in and then zoom out, capturing detail in one drawing, and then context in an another. Everyone will use the same format paper and will complete numerous drawings that when put together as a collective will form a collage of place.
Thinking of the street in a series of drawings will evoke experiences and create memories of place, texture, details and atmosphere.
In the workshop we will use observation as the first step,as studying what you see before putting down any marks allows clear subjects to appear before sketching starts.
In the second step, we will learn how to simplify complex scenes, looking at shapes and outlines leading to simple sketches that have a clear focus. We will also look at architectural elements in isolation and use different coloured pens to highlight certain features in these exercises.

The third step will be to put all of these “ingredients” together in a series of sketches. We will look how the architectural elements explored in the previous steps can be visually connected and look at how not to feel compelled to sketch every window, doorway and detail and yet still convey characteristics of place. What’s left out is just as important as what’s included in a sketch. We will look to add streetlife and the people of Wellington into the scene, to create a dynamic feeling to the sketches. Pockets of detail and density can highlight each participant’s initial observations and lead to a series of delightful sketches.
Each participant will do these drawings on provided media; a vertically narrow format piece of paper which will keep the sketch concise.
At the end of the workshop each participant will have learned the importance of observation before starting to sketch. They will also have learnt a step-by-step process that will encourage a confident feeling about producing a series of simple playful sketches at different scales that describe a visual journey.