It Rained, It Poured, But We Drew Anyway!!

Today was our inaugural SketchCrawl event for the area, and I was very happy with how it all went, ESPECIALLY since the weather was not at all cooperative.

Still, even as it rained- (poured actually), we attracted a head count of about 23 very enthusiastic participants, many who asked when we were going to have another one when it was time to go!

Most stayed through lunch until about 2:00, sketching all of the cool memorabilia from Mexico all over Casa Tina Restaurant. Tina was nice enough to give us a 10% discount on all of our food and allow us to come in and sketch even before the restaurant was officially
open. I was very grateful to have a comfortable, interesting place to be while all the rain happened, and with great food to keep us all happy....Who could ask for more?! (Thanks, Tina!)

The photo shown at the top of this post is of part of the group who sketched along the Pinellas Trail near the Historical Society building (which was the old train station back when the Pinellas Trail was railroad track that ran between Clearwater up to Tarpon Springs through Dunedin).

Other participants in the Dunedin SketchCrawl chose to sketch areas near the fountain closer to the Marina park, from the porch of the old Paper Players shop, and several other locations in and around downtown before the downpour started, about an hour and a half into the crawl.

I loved meeting all of the other artists who came for the event. Everyone was so nice, and were genuinely happy, I think, that we could get together and do something like this in the area. Several came over from Tampa, one came from New Port Richey, one even from Homosassa Springs, all after reading about it in the newspaper.

The participants who came the farthest for the event were my sister, Sandy, who came down from Charleston for the weekend and my online friend, Valri, who came over from Melbourne (east coast of Florida) and stayed with me the night before Sketch Crawl. I was so happy to finally meet her, after talking online and on the phone for the past three years.

On the Thursday before the crawl, I was fortunate enough to have a really terrific article run on page 2B of the The St. Petersburg Times. I had sent press releases out to all of the local papers, and got quite a few listings in the event calendars, so that helped stir up interest. For our very first SketchCrawl, I was impressed with the turnout we had, especially on a very ugly day outside. I know that the newspaper coverage was instrumental in helping us muster up the great attendance.

Here are the sketches that I did on the crawl. I know that I wrote that we had 18-20 participants in my sketchbook, but after I tallied up the latecomers and those who didn't make it to lunch, I realized I had left some people out of the total so it was really 23.

It was a really fun day, and I probably could have finished a few more sketches if I wasn't chit-chatting so much, but it was great to talk with everyone and look through their sketchbooks. And of course we had to take some time to enjoy lunch at Casa Tina.

I feel sure that we will be doing more like this again.

Thanks to everyone who came out. I thoroughly enjoyed myself!