Quick Portrait & Slow Capriccio

With Ink, Pastel & Coffee-Wash

A) Short Introduction to explain the sketching exercises followed by 5 minutes of meditation.

B) 20-minute Portrait Sketch done in a quick ‘Zen’ like gesture drawing with white pastel, fusain and charcoal on tone paper.

C) 30-minute Capriccio sketching exercise (Lucien Steil will provide a half-finished capriccio (11” x 17”) to have participants develop and render with ink, color pencil, and coffee wash.

D) Pin-Up of the sketches and discussion

Required Material:

Participants should bring:

- Soft pencils, ink pen, fountainhead pens, markers, ballpoint pens, etc. (as appropriate)

- Color pencils (soft), Pastel pencils (soft)

- A pair of watercolor brushes

- A small recipient to mix up the gouache

- A tube of white gouache and a little bottle of water

- Some paper napkin

Instructor Biography:

Lucien Steil is an architect, artist and author from Luxembourg. He has studied architecture and urbanism in Paris and Vincennes and went to work with Maurice Culot and Leon Krier in Brussels before setting up a practice in Luxembourg with Irish architect Colum Mulhern. He has lectured in Europe and the USA, and taught at Oregon School of Design, Polytechnical University of Puerto Rico, University of Miami, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, University of Notre Dame, US Campus and Rome Studies Program, etc. He has taught Summer Schools with the University of Bologna, the Premio Rafael Manzano Martos and Intbau Spain, the Princes Foundation and the Prince of Wales’s Urban Design Task Force, as well as with the University of Buckingham. He is presently an Associate Teaching Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame. Lucien Steil is a member of INTBAU College of Traditional Practitioners (ICTP), and a Honoris Causa member of the Istituto Italiano di Bioarchitettura.

Lucien Steil is a principal of Katarxis Urban Workshops asbl. (Luxembourg), and ‘Heure Bleue Architecture’ (London). He is the chief-editor of KATARXIS (online journal on traditional architecture and urbanism), and a regular contributor to the Journal of Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (Madrid). He is the editor of “The Architectural Capriccio, Memory, Fantasy and Invention” (Ashgate/ Routledge, UK), and co-editor with A. Sagharchi of “New Palladians: Sustainability and Modernity for 21st Century Architecture”, (ArtMedia Press, London) as well as of “Traditional Architecture: Timeless Building for the Twenty-First Century” (Rizzoli, New York). He published “In the Mood for Architecture: Tradition, Modernism & Serendipity” in 2018 (Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, Tubingen), and “Travel Sketches from Elsewhere & Nowhere” in 2022 (Ediciones Asimetricas, Madrid)

Sketching Workshop with Lucien Steil

By Chicago ICAA

Sketching Workshop with Lucien Steil