Twas that time again and to participate in the 44th Worldwide Sketchcrawl we all gathered at the Jardin Botanique Roger-Van Den Ende de l’Université Laval.  French names are often more than a mouthful.  This is a large garden run by and adjacent to Laval University.  The university gave us the run of the place, a very large place with tons of flowers and other things to sketch.  We couldn’t have asked for better weather than we got.  Sunny, warm but not stifling hot and the garden provided considerable amounts of shade, though not always in the required spot.

It was difficult to count the participants as we spread out across the landscape.  Maybe we should have had a “sketcher hunt” the way kids hunt for Easter eggs as you could walk the trails and find sketchers scrunched down over plants, drawing away, or hiding in the shade while trying to draw an arbor.  By my count, however, we set a new sketchcrawl record with 27 participants.  Everyone seemed to have a good time.

The name of the game was to find some shade, identify something to draw, and then “just do it” as the saying goes.  Much sketching was done on this day but we broke for lunch a little after noon and met in a large tent that exists for this purpose.  It was fun to see most of the sketchers all in one place and to kibbitz and share sketches.  Unfortunately, I took photos of this before everyone arrived but by the time they did I was embroiled in conversation and sketchbook swapping.

Here is evidence of sketching being committed and the perpetrators (click on a photo to see a larger view):

And here is a small sampling of the sketches that were done this Saturday:

This post is getting long enough that I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to post the sketches I did when I wasn’t taking photos of sketchers (grin).  By the end of the day I think we’d all learned and/or remembered a few important things.  These are: