Apple-Pine: Toulouse, France 2026: Trip to the Urban Sketchers Symposium and a few days around It. Part 8: City

I decided to split all my "Toulouse city" sketches into two posts. Mostly because when I look through them, I see two very different approaches and two different things to learn from them.

This is part 1:

These sketches took longer; they are mostly painted with gouache and mixed media, and I used different papers. I can definitely see which ones were done at the beginning of the trip and which ones came later - with a more relaxed and "in the groove" feeling I developed by the end of the trip. Looking at them now - after almost a month since I was there - I wish I could re-do them all :) It is obvious that there were several sketches that had to happen only so that better sketches had a chance. There is a long list of "what is wrong" in my head, but I am working on focusing on positive things in each sketch. So here they are:

I am grateful for the idea of pre-mixing certain gouache colors to take with me.
And that there were not too many of them.
I am glad I thought about pairing my paints with other media in terms of colors and how they work together.
I liked the overlapping, and leaning into a more gestural/dancing approach to composing my pages.
I like how white space worked in the bridge sketch.
And I remember how I enjoyed adding typographical elements - even is it is ineligible mostly now.