Bhubaneswar, April 17: A group of artists have vegun a weekly exercise to capture heritage sites of Old Town on canvas.

An initiative by Urban Sketchers, a global group for artists who practise on-location drawing, the group aims to raise the artistic storytelling and educational value of on-location drawing, promoting its practice and connecting people around the world who draw on location where they live and travel.

The members of the group's Bhubaneswar chapter will walk the streets of Old Town to paint heritage structures every Sunday.

The group began their initiative yesterday with a 10-member group capturing on canvas the Mukteswar-Kedargouri temple complex.

Yesterday's group included three professional architects, five students of architecture, a professor of architecture from the School of Architecture, KIIT University, and one student of education.

"The theme was to capture the urban life elements in the backdrop of the old structures,'' said Swayamprakash Mohanty, moderator of the group. The sketches produced by the group were later displayed at the temple precincts for a special session titled Show and Tell.

Talking about bigger plans of the local group of Urban Sketchers, moderator Nutan Godse said: "The sketches produced after every Sunday will be preserved and on a special occasions, they will be displayed for public viewing either at a park or any public place in the city. We want everyone to see our city in sketches."

Next week, the team will be working on the banks of Bindu Sagar. The group will consist an artists' group of 20 from KIIT School of Architecture. "We will make sketches of the Bindu Sagar waterfront from the Kedar Gouri Lane Square to Old Dharmashala," said Godse.

At present, there are 23 members in the group. After making the sketches of the major old Bhubaneswar locations such as Lingaraj, Rajarani, Ekamra Van, Dhauli, Chausathi Yogini, Bhaskareswar, Yameswar, Bakreswar, Chitrakarini, Suka-Sari, Lingaraj Police Station and the crafts street along the Samantarapur-Dhauli Road, the artists will come to the central part of the planned city in Unit I and Unit II areas.

The members of Urban Sketchers maintain a network of blogs and online groups where they share their drawings and stories and interact with each other. They partner with schools, universities, museums, municipal corporations and trade associations to create events that promote the art of on-location sketching and also organise workshops and symposiums on urban sketching.

In 2007, a global community of Urban Sketchers began to form when American journalist and illustrator Gabriel Campanario created an online forum inviting people to share their stories with the aim, "See the World, One Drawing at a Time".