Sketch the World

Arturo Quijada is an urban sketcher, architect, and teacher based in Mexico City. Trained as an architect, he spent more than a decade designing civic buildings before a sabbatical in Lisbon turned a hobby into a calling; he traded the drafting table for a sketchbook and never fully returned. He has taught his one-hour sketching method across Latin America, Europe, and Asia, leading workshops at International Urban Sketchers symposiums, and his drawings have appeared in the Urban Sketchers blog and in art and travel magazines. Known for carrying a single fountain pen and a pocket watercolor palette wherever he goes — the same kit he recommends in these pages — he sketches every day, whether he is standing in a Bangkok market at dawn or on his own street in Mexico at dusk. His work explores how ordinary places reveal themselves to patient attention, and his workshops emphasize speed, courage, and good-humored imperfection over polish. He lives with his wife and son in a house whose walls are papered with sketches of places he hopes one day to revisit. *Sketch the World* is his first book.