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Urban Sketchbook for Non-Drawers(Multi-session) taught by Tara Tieso
July 6, 2025 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Multi-Session Class
Meets 3 Sundays, July 6,13,+20 from 2-4pmIN PERSON CLASS
Real Doesn’t Have to Be Realistic.
Let’s re-conceptualize the urban sketchbook experience! Teaching artist Tara L. Tieso did and has never looked back.
She learned that you don’t need to know how to draw, have specialized art materials, understand architecture, or walk to exotic urban locales to keep an urban sketchbook!
Summer is the perfect time to venture out (or observe from a favorite window) with your favorite sketchbook and materials and fill pages exploring themes, form, color, movement, feeling, pattern, mapping and more with fun, free-form exercises and representational elements that will make your urban sketchbook uniquely yours.
NOT a learn-to-draw class, instead we will capture moments and locations in this learn-to-discover-how-anything-in-your-urban- environment-can-be-used-to-prompt-your-creativity-in-the-moment class!
The urban sketchbook is also a great way to discover and capture ideas that can lead to other artwork, writing, and moments of meditative beauty.
SUPPLIES:
Note from your instructor Tara Tieso:
Truly, the materials are not the most important thing. You could do this whole class with a golf pencil, a Bic pen, and Crayola crayons or markers.
But you will have the most fun in a sketchbook, and in the class if you love your materials!
If you need to economize, pick a few fun things to use, OR if you are interested in experimenting, add some new things you’ve never tried.
Paper
Heavier -mixed media type pads – white or toned, any convenient portable size will work… think 8×10 or 6×8 or square or landscape dimension such as: Pentalic Nature Sketch, Strathmore Mixed Media Vision, Strathmore Visual Journal (mixed media or watercolor), or Stillman and Birn Toned Mixed Media pads.
A Pen for sketching.
If you need to purchase one, Tara recommends these:
Faber Castell Pitt artist brush pens
Fine line permanent pen –such as: Faber Castell, Pentel Finito, Pigma Micron, Platinum fountain pen with carbon ink cartridges(waterproof)
Bring colors/media of your choice plus brush if using water soluble.
Suggestions:
– any small portable watercolor set and Aquash water brush
– water soluble colored pencils and Aquash water brush
– Marabu Art Crayons with Aquash water brush.
– oil pastels (no brush needed)
Classes have a limited space available and some fill quickly. Decisions about whether to cancel a class or add another session are typically made one week prior to the start of a class. If a class you are interested in is full we will have a waiting list and will contact you if a space opens up. If a class is cancelled due to low enrollment (fewer than 4 registrations) all registrations will be promptly refunded.
Ticket Instruction: You must choose a quantity to activate “get tickets”. To pay for a class registration with a Wet Paint gift card, please call 651-698-6431
Tara L. Tieso is an abstract artist residing in the historic Lowertown arts district of Saint Paul along the mighty Mississippi. She works in encaustic, an ancient beeswax and resin medium fused to its substrate with a torch, as well as pen and ink – and loves every kind of water-soluble media! Tara is Past Board President of nationally celebrated WARM, Women’s Art Resources Minnesota – where she worked with other women in the arts to steward the rich 40-year feminist legacy of Minnesota’s brilliant women artists. She currently serves as Board Chair of The Show Non-Profit, which supports artists with disabilities. Tara brings a love of community from her experience in social work and therapy, and as a teaching artist, she facilitates Wet Paint’s Book Club (free on zoom!), Creative Circles from her loft studio, and a myriad of Wet Paint classes that require no art experience of any kind, ever! A grateful recipient of the McKnight Foundation-funded Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Next Step Grant, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant; she is one of 30 ArtSage Minnesota Artists, and a winner of North Hennepin Community College Award of Excellence in Memory of Lance Kiland from the Minnesota State Fair Foundation. Her work hangs in private collections in the Twin Cities, greater Minnesota, and Philadelphia.
