RITA SABLER (Portland, OR USA) has taught Urban Sketching courses at the Pacific Northwest College of Art since 2016. She has presented numerous lectures and workshops on drawing inspiring diverse audiences to cultivate a lifelong passion for urban sketching. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions around Portland and beyond.
Drawing is Rita’s therapy, her passion, and her refuge. It is her way of understanding and communicating with the world around her. Rita’s main areas of interest are Reportage Illustration, Travel Sketching, and Visual Storytelling are, and she is often seen on street corners capturing busy markets, festivals, protestors, musicians, and regular citizens living their life in both ordinary and extraordinary ways.
Rita holds a B.A. degree in Psychology and Art, an M.A. in Linguistics, and a Masters in Interface Design from The Elisava School of Design in Barcelona. When not sketching or teaching she is a busy designer, parent, and a tango pianist.
Rita Sabler is the USk Education Director since late 2019.
Drawing is Rita’s therapy, her passion, and her refuge. It is her way of understanding and communicating with the world around her. Rita’s main areas of interest are Reportage Illustration, Travel Sketching, and Visual Storytelling are, and she is often seen on street corners capturing busy markets, festivals, protestors, musicians, and regular citizens living their life in both ordinary and extraordinary ways.
Rita Sabler is the USk Education Director since late 2019.
COMMITTEE MEMBERS
VIRGINIA HEIN was born in LA, California, and the landscape of the city has always been her favorite subject. She has worked as a concept and character designer for toys and entertainment, and as art director, illustrator and fine artist. Currently she teaches drawing at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, as well as sketching workshops. She posts regularly as a correspondent on Urban Sketchers, and has contributed her work to a number of books about sketching on location. Her book “5 Minute Sketching: Landscape” was published in Sept., 2017. Her work on location can also be seen on flickr and her blog.

NINA JOHANSSON (Stockholm, Sweden) grew up in Umeå in Northern Sweden, lives and works in Stockholm since 1996. Graduated from University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm 2002, and teaches arts, design and computer graphics. She also paints, mainly watercolours, and does some illustration work. Drawing has always been an important part of her life, and urban life is what makes her tick artistically. Stockholm is a constant source of inspiration for her sketchbooks. Blog
ROB SKETCHERMAN (Hong Kong) Self-taught and crediting comic books for teaching him how to draw Rob only learned about the practice of recording and sharing one’s life through urban sketching a few years ago. Compelled to simplify and downsize in his cosy Hong Kong home, and inspired by David Hockney’s embrace of the iPad as a medium, he decided to go completely digital at the beginning of 2014, embracing the speed and versatility of working with what he often refers to as his Ultimate Mobile Digital Studio. Using the app Procreate with his iPad Pro and Apple Pencil has allowed him to work quickly and mess-free from any location in seconds.
Rob now loves the immediacy of responding to sights, smells, sounds and snippets of stories of as they unfold before him. His work has since taken him around the world on commissions and workshops, where he leads people of all stripes to use iPads on their own journeys of recording their lives and making art on the street.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robsketcherman/
Website: www.sketcherman.com

SHARI BLAUKOPF is a Montreal-based teacher, painter and sketch blogger who loves to travel and share her love of sketching. She’s the author of The Urban Sketching Handbook: Working with Color, and you can find her online courses Sketching Landscapes in Pen, Ink and Watercolor and Sketching the City in Pen, Ink and Watercolor on Bluprint.com. She’s been part of the Urban Sketchers community since 2012, is a co-founder of Urban Sketchers Montreal, and has given many workshops at USk symposia and through the Urban Sketchers Workshop Program. Her watercolors are in corporate, government and private collections in North America and abroad, and she’s a signature member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour.
Blog: www.shariblaukopf.com
Website: www.blaukopfwatercolours.com
Instagram @sharisketcher
Blog: www.shariblaukopf.com
Website: www.blaukopfwatercolours.com
Instagram @sharisketcher
PETER RICHARDS (South-East Queensland, Australia) is a practicing architect and urban designer in Australia. He is a champion of collaborative design and is well known for his drawing skills to inform and reveal design thinking through design workshops. He regularly teaches design thinking and drawing at university in architecture and broader professional development programs. He has sketched on location for more than 30 years and has been an active member of Urban Sketchers Brisbane since 2017. He was one of the initiators and organizers of the successful Brisbane Sketchfest in October 2019.
Web : designthinkingdrawing.com
Instagram pr_designthinkingdrawings
Web : designthinkingdrawing.com
Instagram pr_designthinkingdrawings
ED HARKER (Bath, UK) is a Nursery/Kindergarten teacher by training, and until recently the head-teacher of an Infant school in Bath, UK. He started daily drawing from life in 2011 and began urban sketching after reading Nina’s blog while researching portable paint palettes! He introduced drawing from life as a part of his school’s curriculum soon after, and has been sharing his sketching progress through a blog since 2012.
He is an avid explorer of sketching materials, resources and techniques, and most weekends can be found sketching around Bath or with the lovely local Bristol USk group. Ed has joined sketch-crawls in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Girona and Cordoba, and sketched in Japan, Italy, Turkey, Austria, France, Portugal, and Romania; the welcoming worldwide USk community is a beautiful thing!
Blog: mostlydrawing.com