2025 Urban Sketching & Sketch Booking Symposium

Unlock Your Creativity: Come to the 3rd Annual Sketchbook Symposium at the Yellowstone Art Museum!

Are you ready to start your journey of self-expression, imagination, and artistic discovery? Look no further! Our “Sketchbook Symposium” is designed to ignite your creativity, one page at a time.

Why a Sketchbooks Symposium:

Sketchbooks can be anything you want them to be. Visual diaries, places to test new mediums and techniques, or just a place to draw. They can allow you to capture fleeting moments, emotions, and scenes from your everyday life. A sketchbook can be your incubator for ideas. It’s where concepts take shape, evolve, and transform.

Whether you’re a seasoned artist or a complete beginner, a sketchbook habit builds confidence. It’s a judgment-free zone where imperfections are celebrated.

Sketchbooks are versatile creative spaces that cater to a wide range of artistic expressions. People can explore:

Shane de Leon: Loosening your Sketchbook – Freedom from Perfection
Shane de Leon is the driving force behind Miss Massive Snowflake and progenitor of Kirks’ Grocery. Shane has been creating art, prints, sketches, and sounds since his days at the Billings Career Center. His message to creatives is “get over yourselves.” To Shane sketch booking is all about the process, and not the product. Perfection is the enemy of creativity, and Shane will help us cast away our desire to make “perfect” art and embrace our imperfect creativity.

Anne Holeb: Filling the Blank page with Words
Anne is a poet, and last year’s poet-in-residence at the Yellowstone Art Museum. Sketchbooks come to life with written words, often reflections of the thing we are sketching, or reflections about life that come to us in metaphor as we sit and sketch. Anne will provide ideas and inspiration to use to bring sketch booking to a new level.

Kathleene Jore: Visual Journaling
Come join me as I demonstrate one of my favorite art forms, visual journaling. It is a fantastic combination of writing, drawing, painting, and collage that allows a person to build a book bursting with self-expression. As you build your journal and add to it, you will find it is a welcoming space to create, even if you don’t know what you want to create. Visual journaling is not only a really fun art form, but also extremely accessible. There are no specialized tools required, materials are easy to get, and it can be enjoyed by any age or skill level. Best of all, you can work on it in little pockets of time.

John Kennedy: Urban Sketching
I’ll be around the museum all day, to talk about my sketchbook practice and demonstrate some of the skills needed for Urban Sketching. Urban Sketching to me is as much about community as it is about art, and the skills we acquire practicing this craft translate to any kind of sketch booking. Whether you are as thrilled about old buildings and alleyways as I am or not, I’ll do my best to encourage you to bring some kind of creativity into your life. The rewards are amazing.

Vince Long: Tools of the Trade
In this workshop we will look at a variety of tools used for sketching in many situations. Mark-making devices such as pencils, pens, markers, and watercolors will be examined along with a variety of media from paper to vellum to Mylar. Other tools mentioned will include erasers, fixative, sharpeners, brushes, straightedges, carrying devices, and seating. Digital tools will also be covered.

Rebecca Newton: Nature Journaling
Getting in touch with Nature does not require roughing it in a remote forest fighting off bears and wolves. Nature Journaling helps us pay closer attention to, and brings us a better understanding of the natural world we live in. Whether it be a better understanding of plants, insects, and animals; or tracking the subtle changes that occur as seasons progress, Rebecca will help us explore ways we can use an art journaling practice to document the natural world around us, whether that be a remote forest, a camping trip, a hike on a well-worn trail, a nearby park, or your own backyard.

Cecil Pegram: Urban Portraits
Cecil will demonstrate his unique style of urban portraiture, using pen and watercolor. Cecil is a Billings Urban Sketcher and is a master of color and line, and he will demonstrate his unique style of urban portraiture.

Nancy Peterson: Zen Doodling
Zen Art is a mindfulness study of drawing using pattern and basic drawing tools. During the process of drawing with these techniques the artist often experiences “being in the moment without interpretation or judgement.” Participants in this workshop will be introduced to space organization, layout suggestions, and repetitive patterns to get started with this stress reducing practice.

Special Creative Journaling Workshop with Stan Fellows (by registration only)
This class is full.

Please join us in welcoming visiting artist Stan Fellows to Billings for this special two-day symposium workshop. Come discover a new and unique approach to using watercolor. This class will meet from 1 – 4 PM on Saturday (5/17) and then again from 10 AM – 1 PM on Sunday (5/18). It is accessible to non-artists and inspiring to experienced painters.

These workshops are structured to help you get started, workshop leaders will guide you through selecting a sketchbook, pencils, erasers, pens, paints, and other supplies. Our workshop leaders will demonstrate and give you the opportunity of trying various sketchbook practices and techniques and show you how to integrate sketching into your daily routine.