It's no secret to those who know me: I don't love San Francisco. I think it's interesting, topographically speaking, but my affection generally ends there. We live barely an hour south, and I go up there for work or a sketching event fairly frequently, but I usually don't crave a ramble there otherwise. So when I was preparing for my focus session on urban sketching at the Plein Air Convention, I had a hard time finding sketches I had done of the city.

For a Bay Area "local," that was a bit ... embarrassing.

Time to change that, right? As a prelude to the convention, I took Heather Martin's gouache workshop at Yerba Buena Gardens. (Her work is amazing, by the way.) I had passed the place en route to the Moscone Center a dozen times, but I had never actually wandered in. So it was lovely to park myself on a bench and play with color, soaking in the SF sunshine.



I told myself I'd do my best to play (savvy) tourist during the convention: to explore and sketch and learn to love (well, at least *like*) the City by the Bay.