Sketch Fest
Alto Douro Vinhateiro
“Desenhar é uma forma de encontro”: drawing is a way of bringing people together. An artistic and educational festival about rediscovering drawing, outdoors, with other people.
Most people drew constantly as children and then stopped. Sketch Fest exists to get that back: to build a community that helps people find a good relationship with a sketchbook again, in a way that is simple and open to anyone, and to do it outdoors, in a place worth looking at.
Drawing has a way of slowing you down and making you look at things from a different perspective. That is the whole argument. The landscape, the people, the community and the act of drawing end up being one experience rather than four.
First edition, 2025, Sabrosa
Three days in Sabrosa, and the founding moment of the project. Around twenty participants from different backgrounds, most of whom did not know each other.
The programme moved between drawing the landscape and exploring the territory: the vineyard terraces, the walks between them, the slow looking that drawing forces on you. Pedro Loureiro, António Modesto and Cláudia Martins worked with us on the programme and led sessions across the three days.
The drawings became an exhibition at Espaço Miguel Torga. One of them, chosen by the participants themselves, went onto the label of a special edition wine from the Adega Cooperativa de Sabrosa, which closed a loop the project had been reaching for from the start.
Second edition, 2026, Sketch Fest BIP
The second edition was not something we planned as a change of direction. An opportunity came up to run the project inside a different framework, and we took it.
It became a Blended Intensive Programme under Erasmus+, inside a micro-credential, with the Universidade de Aveiro: a full week instead of a weekend, six universities, ten nationalities. Bruno Mantraste led the group, and Pedro Loureiro returned to teach within the week.
The brief was more concrete than the first edition’s. Students were asked to develop mural proposals for the concrete tanks at the Adega Cooperativa de Sabrosa.
Working up to it
The week did not go straight at the brief. It worked up to it.
First came exercises: experiments with objects, drawing exercises in the sketchbook, informal exploration, stretches of time that were not going anywhere in particular. All of it about observing and experimenting rather than producing.
Then a full-scale painting exercise, on kraft paper with long-handled brushes. That was not the proposal either. It was there to loosen everyone up, get them comfortable at that size, and let them enjoy painting before the focused work started.
Only afterwards did they move to the maquettes, where the actual mural proposals for the Adega Cooperativa’s tanks were developed.
The maquettes are the same domed shape as a real tank, small enough to work around, and this is where the proposals were actually developed.
Painting on a curve, at a size you can walk around, is a different problem from painting on paper.
Designing an event
Designing an event is all about how people feel and what they remember. It is not just the programme, the identity or the list of activities. It is how people arrive, who they end up talking to, what they have in their hands, and what stays with them once it is over.
Which means the work runs from identity and communication through to programme, materials, accommodation, spaces and logistics, moving constantly between creative decisions and practical constraints.
Design is the tool here, not the deliverable.
Credits
Founded with Isabel Seixas. First edition in Sabrosa with Pedro Loureiro, António Modesto and Cláudia Martins, the Adega Cooperativa de Sabrosa and Espaço Miguel Torga. Second edition led by Bruno Mantraste, with the Universidade de Aveiro.
Photographs on this page are from the 2026 edition and are shown to illustrate the festival rather than to document a particular programme.