Pedro Loureiro is from Lagos. On this tour, he comes home to see everything with fresh eyes.
Born in the western Algarve, a childhood of lego and sand castles led him to study architecture, but teenage years spent with comic books encouraged him to pursue illustration. He now works across both professions, as an architectural illustrator. He likes to draw, to travel, and to cut vegetables into tiny pieces.
He regularly teaches on drawing and watercolour workshops and tells stories on his blog, Storysketching, and on Urban Sketchers Portugal. He has written articles for Drawing Attention, the monthly Urban Sketchers magazine. He coordinates the Wedding Sketchers with two other artists and the model drawing group Muse Lisboa.
Pedro has a curious mind and a gentle nature, and shows us his homeland generously.
What surprised you on this journey?
The experience of drawing a journey is familiar to me. The surprising thing was seeing the journey and the region through the eyes of my travel companions. The difference in the gaze, the attention, and the discovery that each made of the Algarve. Our own view of a journey is not as valuable as the mosaic of views of a group of travellers with different artistic outlooks.
Tell us something you saw that you had never seen before.
I am from the western Algarve and have rarely visited the eastern side. Discovering places in the region I grew up in but that I hadn't seen yet was a revelation, especially the cliffs of Algar Seco and the alleys and stories of the people of Albufeira.
If you had to tell a child about your journey, what would you say?
Our sketch book is like a little box of treasures that we keep, holding places and people we have met. The drawings we make of a journey are our secret, but one that everyone is welcome to see.
How has this experience changed the way you travel from now on?
Each journey I make is unique and is always recorded in my sketch books. This one in particular showed me that even places we think we know well always have something new to offer the senses. Drawing helps us stay in a place long enough for those new aspects to reveal themselves.
