2025 Artist Talks

Art as an Opportunity

When I injured my drawing hand in New York a few years ago; when I sketched around my Paris neighborhood during the pandemic lockdown; or when I almost burned out recording all sorts of sporting events at the recent Olympic…

Mixed Media: Changing Gears Based on the City’s Essence

Every city speaks a different visual language. In this talk, I’ll share how I adapt my sketching tools and techniques—switching between ink, watercolor, pencil, pastel, pen, dip pen and more—to capture the unique rhythm, texture, and mood of each place.…

Extreme Travel Sketching: What to Bring and How to Survive

I’ve been sketching while scuba diving, kayaking, and while on a horseback. And I’ve been doing it while traveling with little and big humans. In this talk I will share my physical and mental tools from my adventures that range…

Exploring Themes with Sketch Collections

What’s possible when we go beyond single sketches and create a series or collection? I’ll share art from my street-themed projects and artists residencies, and discuss my process, including the benefits of setting boundaries, choosing subject matter, and working within…

Sketching Along the Loire River Delta

I started a sketchbook for the simple pleasure of painting the beaches, industrial sites and natural environment near my home in Pornichet, a charming small town on the Atlantic coast of France. Soon, my watercolor sketches revealed a fascinating landscape…

Long-form Reportage

Learn the step-by-step process of developing an idea for a long form or interview-based reportage project into a transcribed script, working through thumbnails, sketches, inked pages, finals, all the way up to finding and pitching your reportage project to publications.…

Drawing After Naptime

Traveling as a young parent is hard enough. Making time to sketch while traveling is harder. In this talk, I share sketches from my trip to see family in India, and the ideas and techniques that helped me keep drawing…

Drawing with a Mission

My own inner voice has been very clear: I never saw myself as Monet in the studio; I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain with a sketchbook. The mission was never to create beautiful drawings or to fill a record number…

Less is More: Slow Travel Sketching

Slow travel is a natural companion to on-location sketching, but we all still feel the pressure to see it all – an impossible task. I will share experiences and sketches from a variety of my travels, from traversing New Zealand…

Turning your Sketchbook Journal into a Compelling Travelogue

I will share my journey of transforming travel sketchbooks into published travelogues. From Chateau d’Orquevaux, France (2023) to Romania (2025) and now Argentina, I will discuss the challenges of crafting a compelling narrative, the struggle of never writing enough in…

Sketching on the Fly: A whirlwind Tour of Southeast Asia

I just returned from a three-month tour of Southeast Asia. To record the experience in my sketchbook I had to move quickly and adapt to a constantly changing environment — navigating bustling streets, intense heat and unfamiliar cultural norms. In…

Drawing as an Extreme Sport

Drawing as a trophy, drawing as a sport, drawing as an ultimate way to understand and remember. This talk focuses on the constant need to record and the fascination with drawing in difficult situations, including caves, busy places and COVID…

Illustrated Journalism

When you draw, what story do you want to tell? How do you weave the who, what, when, where and why in your sketches? Can you make your narrative content memorable? I will share my own visual stories from the…

Aimlessly Wandering

I found sketching, or sketching found me, during COVID. Wandering my community after years of traveling, I discovered a changed urban environment, at times unrecognizable but compelling and transitory. Exploring this through sketching called me, and I haven’t stopped since…

How to Find Your Sketching Style

If you haven’t found your sketching style yet, don’t worry. I like to say that “you don’t find a style, the style finds you.” I can’t really perceive my own sketching style, and you might not be able to see…

31 Days in South America

In this talk I will share my experience traveling and sketching in Colombia, Peru and Argentina last fall, from packing light and researching itineraries and must-sketch locations, to connecting with people across different cultures. All my careful planning for this…

My Life as a Reportage Artist

In this talk I will discuss some recent reportage commissions for the French Air Force, Qatar Museum and the Italian Institute of Astrophysics to show how powerful urban sketching is for storytelling. I will also share how a sketching reportage…