A Decade On

[By Pete Scully in Davis, California]

Happy TENTH Birthday to the Urban Sketchers blog!

The USk blog launched ten years ago today on November 1, 2008, back when Urban Sketchers was a lot smaller than it is now. Ten years ago I posted on that very first day with a sketch of this house, on the corner of D and 6th Streets in Old North Davis (see “and these leafy mysteries” from 11/01/2008). So I thought I should return to that same spot and see what has changed in ten years. Well, the big tree has gone, the pink fence is now brown, but the house is still pretty, as are most of the old houses in historic Old North Davis. That hydrant is still there, still yellow, standing guard; I’ve drawn many of its brothers and sisters in the past ten years. The 2008 version is below. The leaves turned orange earlier that year, but a new tree has sprung up from behind that small fence, plus a couple of smaller ones to the left of the hydrant. I have spent much of the past decade in Davis just watching trees rise and fall.

Back on that opening day the first blog header we ever used featured a page of my sketches from San Francisco, so I took the following photo back on that first day, on my old computer in my old apartment (I couldn’t do screenshots back then, but you get to see the sketchbook too). This was before the famous USk logo, before it was a .org, before even the Manifesto was finished, but we’re still seeing the world, one drawing at a time! (Or actually six, in the case of that sketchbook)

So Happy Birthday you Urban Sketchers, thousands of drawings, eight symposia, many books, countless workshops and sketchcrawls and of course many many new friendships later, and of course a huge THANK YOU to Gabi Campanario, our amazing founder. Keep on sketching!