Sketchy News

Hello, we are Chuck and Julie and welcome to our sketchy world! We are just a couple of grey-haired hippies who live in a small cozy cottage under a giant sycamore tree and are growing young while living our dream and finding our artistic side. By day, I run a small cleaning business and Julie is a fulltime RN, but the rest of our time is spent mostly creating art and sketchy stuff! Julie is passionate about finding century old vintage windows and bringing them to life by reverse painting them with acrylic paint in a very whimsical and textured style. Online photos do not do them justice as reverse painting is a painstaking step-by-step process but for her is a labor of love. As for me, I recently came across urban sketching (which was a movement created by Gabriel Campanario in 2007) and travel sketching and enjoy the mixture of ink and wash. We are novel, self-taught artists and at this time do not sell our work, so every room in our home has beautiful vintage windows as décor, ha! For us, art has been therapeutic in nature. We simply love to create.

The other thing we love besides creating art is stickers! We have an old Rav4 we call the RRV (Rad Recreational Vehicle), or Rad for short that we take on our sketchy adventures which tells a story in stickers of our journeys. It represents, in a way, who we are. Every time we look at a particular sticker it reminds us of a special time in life. So that’s how Sketchy AF (and fun) Stickers was born. We wanted to create a fun way for Urban Sketchers, Travel Sketchers, or any other Sketchy artists to express themselves in a unique way. We of course are not Amazon, so it takes a few more days to get your orders by snail mail, but we think it will be worth it. By purchase stickers from us, you are not just getting unique and cool stickers to put on your sketch books, laptops, waterbottles, vehicles and other stuff, you are also getting the opportunity to help two groovy hippies support their sketchy art habits.😊

Sketchy Therapy and How We See Our World

One of the things that I have learned to love about urban sketching and travel sketching is how I now appreciate the world around us much more. It is easy to get snow- blind to our local cities and miss so much of their character. Now after drawing many houses and buildings that have beautiful architectural detail from craftsman from over one hundred years ago, my eyes are drawn to thier unique characteristics. I am now seeing so much rich charm where I normally pass by mindlessly through my busy days. We have found that even old dark brick and rock alleys have more uncommon beauty than we ever noticed before.

A little over a year ago, a neighbor was having their 120-year-old wood frame windows replaced and even though at the time she didn’t have any idea what to do with them, Julie couldn’t bear the thought of them being tossed into the landfill. So, we loaded them up and put them in the basement. A few weeks later she had the idea of painting them and hanging them in our sunroom. To this day she has painted over 200 individual panes of glass on vintage wood frame windows with whimsical sunflowers, butterflies, dragonflies, cicadas, caterpillars, ladybugs and more. As she paints, she enjoys thinks about all the people who looked through the old wavey glass over the last century and wonders about their life stories.

Both of us have found our art is more than just creating, which is of course fun, and it is something we can share as a couple. It has also become a form of mindfulness therapy. When we are drawing and painting, we are complete in the moment or the now, time seems to have stopped and we are lost in our happy place.