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July 11-12, 2026

International Festival of Travel Sketchbooks

Edmonds, Washington (USA)

2026 Guest Artists

Dan Archer

Dan Archer is a British graphic journalist and author currently based in Hong-Kong. For more than 15 years, Archer has used cartooning and on-the-spot sketching to cover stories from Colombia to South Korea and many other locations. His debut graphic novel, “Voices from Nepal,” was published by University of Toronto Press in 2024. When he is not drawing, Archer runs Empathetic Media, an XR studio working with clients worldwide, as well as conducting research on biosignals and perspective-taking inside immersive narrative scenarios.

Kumi Matsukawa

Tokyo area sketcher Kumi Matsukawa works as a freelance illustrator and art instructor, specializing in watercolor and pastels. She also works as a courtroom sketcher, a role that draws heavily on her experience of sketching on location. Kumi is a longtime member of the global Urban Sketchers community. She first joined as an international blog correspondent for Japan in 2009. She is the founder and administrator of the Urban Sketchers Japan Facebook group and Flickr group and has participated in several international USk Simposia.

Deb Mostert

Deb Mostert is an Australian multidisciplinary visual artist working across illustration, painting, sculpture and public art. Deb has had two exhibitions of over 100 of her sketchbooks in public galleries in her home state of Queensland and leads regular workshops on how to keep an everyday sketchbook. She was awarded the winning prize in the Centre for Transformative Work Design — Sketching Work competition at Curtin University, Perth in 2017. A recent reportage article on a trip to Kosovo was featured in On the Spot Magazine.

Louis Netter

Louis Netter’s book “Reportage Drawing” (Bloomsbury) is the first academic book to provide a theoretical framework for the act. A practicing illustrator with 25 years of experience currently based in London, Netter is also the author of two graphic novels: “Refuge (Rosarium),” a voodoo western; and “Lizard World” (Black Panel Press), a picaresque satirical romp. His satirical illustration has been published in magazines and books, and is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress, among others in the U.S. and U.K.

Santi Sallés

Santi Sallés is a draftsman, illustrator and graphic designer from Barcelona trained at Elisava School of Design and Engineering, with over 25 years of experience in the field. He has published several books and is an urban sketcher and YouTuber who regularly participates in travel sketchbook festivals such as Matitte en Viaggio in Italy and Rendezvous du Carnet de Voyage in France. He teaches urban sketching at the private university LCI. Since 2014, he has been giving workshops, lectures, and drawing demonstrations worldwide.

Swasky

Swasky is a Barcelona-based illustrator, urban sketcher and secondary-school art teacher. He works on location with ink and watercolour, focusing on reportage drawing and visual storytelling. A two-time international prize winner at Clermont-Ferrand’s Rendez-vous du Carnet de Voyage festival (2012, 2017), Swasky co-hosts and teaches workshops with Pushing Your Sketching Boundaries. He is also the author of “Hola, Miró!!!” for the Fundació Joan Miró and shares his process through newsletters and live sketching from studio practice to streets worldwide.

Elizabeth Alley

Elizabeth Alley is a painter and sketcher from Memphis, Tennessee. She received a BFA from University of Memphis in 1998. As a lifelong sketcher, her focus is on sketching everyday things as a way to prepare for big sketching opportunities. Sketching on location is crucial to her painting practice, informing design decisions and generating subjects for studio work. In 2025 she participated in the Arctic Circle residency and continues the practice of making work about landscapes experienced through actions.

Judith Dollar

Judith Dollar is a Houston-based sketchbook artist and world traveler. Since discovering Urban Sketchers in 2010, she has filled more than 100 sketchbooks by saying “yes” to unexpected stories — sketching a roaring drag race, drawing a chef breaking down a 250-pound tuna, and chasing moments she might once have skipped. She is a founding member of Urban Sketchers Houston and serves on the global USk Membership Committee. Her work has appeared in On the Spot and Uppercase magazines, The Urban Sketching Handbook: Spotlight on Nature, and other publications.

Fred Lynch

Fred Lynch has been a professor of Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design for over three decades. For many years he taught journalistic drawing in Central Italy. When not teaching, he creates artwork and illustrations that are published and exhibited widely.
Fred and his sketching work have been featured on the Travel Channel and in many books on urban sketching. He lectured and taught at USK Symposiums in Barcelona, Paraty, Manchester, Porto, Amsterdam and Poznan. He lives near Boston.

Paul Madonna

Paul Madonna is an award-winning artist and best-selling author known for combining drawing and stories in a wide range of genres, from his enigmatic art series “All Over Coffee” which ran for twelve years in the San Francisco Chronicle, to his large-scale public murals, to his entertaining and sharply-plotted Emit Hopper mystery novels. Paul holds a degree in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University, and was the first — ever! — art intern at Mad magazine.

James Richards

James Richards was an urban designer, professor and workshop instructor before these real jobs morphed into traveling to 50-odd countries, drawing in sketchbooks and becoming someone different in the process. He’s a founder of Urban Sketchers Texas, the author of “Travel Artist” and “Freehand Drawing and Discovery,” and a pretty good video instructor. His work shows up in over 30 instructional drawing books, exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, and was seen on NBC Nightly News. His homes are Siesta Key, Florida;, Winona, Minnesota and the road.

Amy Stewart

Amy Stewart is a bestselling author and artist whose interests in the natural world and other subjects have led her around the world in pursuit of the next book idea. She turned to art for a break from the wordiness of writing, and for the last 20 years, she’s painted in oil, gouache, acrylic, and watercolor. Through her sketchbooks and her popular newsletter, “It’s Good to Be Here,” she’s found a way to combine stories, images, and ideas.

David Chamness

A sketcher for more than 40 years, David Chamness has been a member of Seattle Urban Sketchers since 2012. He was a guest artist at Sketcher Fest 2023 and 2024, an instructor with the Seattle 10x10 series and has taught workshops at Art Spot Edmonds. A Pacific Northwest native and recently retired commercial architect, he lives with his wife in Shoreline and is a dedicated fan of local soccer team Seattle Sounders as well as a follower of European leagues.

Maria Coryell-Martin

Maria Coryell-Martin is an expeditionary artist, following the tradition of traveling artists as naturalists and educators. Her field work has taken her from the Arctic to Antarctica, bringing her face-to-face with polar bears, leopard seals, emperor penguins and narwhals, with residencies ranging from Norway to the Washington State Ferries. Her fieldwork serves as the basis for exhibits, presentations and hands-on workshops to promote observation, inquiry and environmental awareness for audiences of all ages.

Eleanor Doughty

Seattle-based artist Eleanor Doughty shares her sketching adventures and drawing tips on her Substack newsletter “Hand to Paper.” An international teaching artist since 2019, Doughty never misses an opportunity to fill her sketchbooks with lighthearted and colorful drawings that are later sold as prints or turned into publications — she presented “Sleepless in Seoul” at the 2025 Rendez-vous du Carnet de Voyage. When not on the road, she travels vicariously as the co-host of the popular Street View World Tour on Zoom with Hamburg artist Jenny Adam.

Alex Hollmann

Alex Hollmann was born and brought up in South Africa, the grandchild of Russian, Dutch, Irish, and British immigrants. He teaches Classics at the University of Washington but his other great love is ink drawing and watercolor painting out and about in Seattle and while travelling. He enjoys the challenges, adrenaline-rush, and feelings of oneness with the world that come from on-site sketching.

Jorge Che Chacon-Lopez

From a young age, Jorge Che Chacon-Lopez found peace and purpose in drawing and painting. Over the past 25 years, he's worn many creative hats: animator, illustrator, graphic designer, educator and USA Boxing Coach. A proud Chicano artist, he is a former president of the Northwest Watercolor Society and currently teaches visual arts at Atlas High School in West Seattle.

Andika Murandi

It all began at age 6, when a permanent marker and a bedroom wall became Andika’s first sketch. Born and raised in Indonesia, Andika's love for drawing led him to architecture. Now a practicing architect, he continually finds ways to keep his passion for hand drawing and sketching alive. Believing that sharing is caring, Andika also teaches architectural sketching at the University of Washington’s Department of Architecture. Using pen and ink, Andika’s sketches capture the essence of place and time.

Elizabeth and Mary Beth Person

The love of sketching runs in the family of this mother-daughter duo hailing from Snohomish County, Washington. What began as a trip to Italy to hone their skills in plein air painting over a decade ago blossomed into passions for both artists. Mary Beth is an avid calligrapher-turned-sketcher who enhances her sketchbooks by incorporating maps. Elizabeth is a professional illustrator specializing in informational art and Pacific Northwest geography. Their mutual love of maps brings depth and breadth to their respective styles of visual storytelling.

Michael Sánchez

Michael Sanchez is a registered landscape architect with over 30 years of professional experience shaping environments across the western United States, including California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. As Associate Professor of Practice at Washington State University, he teaches site engineering, construction documentation, community engagement and foundational drawing. As a designer and artist of the built environment he is a passionate travel sketcher, visual storyteller, watercolorist and enthusiastically uses his drawing as a communication tool and means of expression.