Yesterday I went on a family trip with my wife and son.  We took with us some snacks, a cooler with ice, water, some cheese, yogurt and home-made ceviche for lunch.  We drove to Guajataca, which is in between Quebradillas and Isabela, at the northwest part of the island.  It was a beautiful and breezy day.  We took turns driving, so both of us did our warm-up sketches on the freeway.  After we had lunch we spent some time sketching.  I managed to do just a few, as I wasn’t fe

This week I received a message from one my professors when I was studying architecture, Manuel García Fonteboa.   Through the years Manuel has become a very good friend of mine and my family. He was taking his first year design studio class to sketch nature at the Jardín Botánico de Rio Piedras, and he was inviting us because we might like joining them.  Of course we were! Also he invited another very good friend of ours and watercolorist, Rafael Félix. It’s funny that the

Friday night I went to a very interesting presentation, called Pecha Kucha.  It is a style originated in Japan designed  for oral presentations to be fast and concise… Designers like to talk too much, so the presentation format is that you show 20 slides and can only speak 20 seconds on each.  They move with a fast pace, so it is dynamic and entertaining.  I got hooked with it and will be exploring how to use this concept. Yesterday I got to make two sketches that I’m not tha

I’d gone several times to the place since I met my wife 17 years ago, but today it was the first time I walked down the street to where the beach is.  It is really close, like 200 ft away from the restaurant, but I never cared to find out what was at the end of the street.  It was actually a nicer scene than I thought.  So I took out one of my sketchbooks and the watercolors. I sketched it directly with the watercolors on a 8″x 5″ sketchbook in less than 10 minutes.  I really

The other day I invited my whole class to go out and sketch at Old San Juan.  It’s true that I told them attendance wasn’t required, but I didn’t expect no one would come.  One of my students, who happens to be a very good friend since I was a student, was the only one who finally came.  I still can’t believe it.  If one of my professors invited me to go out and sketch I was the first one there!  And so were my friends in college.  More than 10 years after graduating we still

Hello everyone!  My name is Luis E. Aparicio and I am from San Juan, Puerto Rico.  I’m new to this community, and to this point I have been enjoying it very much.  This blog will be about one of my passions, sketching.  Please join me even if you’ve never picked up a pencil in 30 years.  When you learn to relax while sketching you will find that it is a wonderful therapy.  You will find that time flies by and you will appreciate your world much more. When I started studying a