Berlin Illustrator Rolf Schroeter talks about his passion for sketching the city and the relationship between art and place…

I was born in a small town near Cologne in West Germany. After an apprenticeship as a stonemason I travelled to Italy, then took a degree in architecture from RWTH Aachen. During all that time, and especially during my architectural studies, I used sketchbooks. I worked as a tutor alongside Professor Heiner Hoffmann, who put a strong emphasis on filling sketchbooks with observational drawings as an essential part of architectural education.

During these Aachen days we were a group of very intense sketchers. We looked at, and commented on, each others work very passionately and there was a competitive spirit that kept things going. The multifaceted surroundings of Aachen, Belgium and Liege and other towns in the Netherlands like Maastricht  were very useful for sketching day trips.

I finished my studies in 2000, moved to Berlin and started a family—we had our first daughter in 2001. Without the challenging presence of my co-sketching friends and with the new needs of a young family, sketching fell into the background. I worked in Berlin first as an architect, then since 2003 at the illustration studio of Markus Junker. In my work as an architect and even more as an illustrator, sketching is an important part of the process, but this ‘design’ sketching is different from observational sketching on location. At GODD.com we illustrate using Computer Graphics, mostly 3D-based, so the sketch is mainly a mean of communication and ‘image-finding’.

Around the beginning of 2009, I was told about the Urban Sketchers Network, founded by Seattle Journalist Gabi Campanario in 2008. I watched it for a while, slowly reactivated my own sketching and in July 2009 I felt confident enough to create my own Flickr account, join the group and post some drawings. I got totally caught by it. The feedback I received and could give was similar to the environment of the Aachen student days. Not quite the same passionate, bar-based roughness but with a wider range of people from multiple cultural backgrounds.

In contrast to my s…