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Social Media

New technology has been crucial to the success of Urban Sketchers. Social Media has shrunk the globe and allowed us to engage with each other share opinions, news and images.

Posting our work, online, is an unnerving experience at first, but it is always nice to get some praise, even if only for having made the effort. Often, surprisingly, other people will think far more of your work that you do, likes and heart emojis accrue at a rate that exceed expectation. There is such a broad range of ability in an Urban Sketching group that there will always be others who understand your struggle and applaud your effort. Mutual support, interaction during sketch crawls and online forge community and friendships.

We use various online platforms for communication and organisation. Urban Sketchers started out as a Flickr group, the platform allowed sharing of images similar to Instagram. The blog allowed longer and more discursive, journals that could be illustrated with images. This is where I first encountered the London group after searching for other like minded individuals via their blogs. Today, Our group still use this format to organise and advertise our sketch crawls and keep an archive of past activities.

Facebook added more content and reflected the character and other interests of members. We maintain a London facebook group which is the first point for uploading drawings after a sketch crawl. Images can easily be viewed and discussed and an archive forms naturally in the News feed. Individuals can also contact each other through messenger, outside the public forum of the group. Often sketchers will form ad hoc groups to sketch together outside the organised events.

Facebook is very visible, making it easy to find us; and other chapters throughout the world. We often have tourists from other countries making contact and joining us to sketch.

This year the London group have started an Instagram page allowing simple hashtag linking within the platform. The close Meta based relationship between facebook and Instagram is likely to develop further in the future.

We maintain strict rules for posting to the London platforms. Drawings must be clearly of an urban environment, the must be drawn on site and have to represent locations within the M25.

NEXT Organising a Crawl

"Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else.""

Mark Twain

Links

Urban Sketchers on Flickr

Urban Sketchers website

Urban Sketchers on facebook

Urban Sketchers on Twitter

Urban Sketchers on Instagram