Expressing emotions and feelings, but also practising a form of knowledge that brings you closer to culture. This is what you do every time you pick up a pencil and draw on paper, and it’s what you’ll do again on the weekend of October 28th and 29th at the Barcelona Draws festival. This year, there’s a novelty: for the first time, nighttime activities are being organized for adults. What if you come to draw Barcelona… at night?

The Picasso Museum and the Barcelona City Council’s Institute of Culture organize the Barcelona Draws festival, bringing together both Barcelona residents of all ages who practice the art of drawing and professionals from the world of visual creation who guide participants or teach workshops. A total of 27 entities, including civic centres, theatres, museums, and various foundations, participated in the festival. This year, new additions to the event include the La Capella Art Centre, the Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya / Centre Obert d’Arquitectura, the Suñol Foundation, and the Catalunya La Pedrera Foundation, as well as the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc.

It all begins with the same poster announcing the activities (pictured above), a work of art in itself co-signed by artist and programmer Fito Conesa and Indian-born filmmaker Siddharth Gautam Singh. They have created ‘El rastro as the only possible drawing’, shining a spotlight on a way of working based on casual strokes and synesthesia, an exercise that suggests a blend of different senses. The blurred trail left by a blooming flower inspires a drawing that, beyond the line, captures all possibilities and angles simultaneously.

In the shadow of this year’s poster, you can enjoy activities such as the one led by artist Eva Lootz at the Suñol Foundation, which encourages you to be inspired by Japanese haikus. Visual artist Jan Barceló will organize a stamping and design activity using stamps at the Picasso Museum, while at the Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria, Marta de los Pájaros will have us creating collages. Embroidery can also be a form of drawing, as demonstrated by a photographer and documentarian during the activity she proposes at the Teatre Lliure archive. Artist and teacher Clara Saura Roso will take you to Montcada Street, where you can let sound guide your drawing of shapes and figures. And at the Museum of Music? Here, composer, artist, and sound activist Julio César Palacio suggests, in a new synesthetic exercise, that you experiment with sound through drawing.

These are just some of the 33 activities organized during Barcelona Draws, which, as mentioned, introduces a major innovation this year: nighttime workshops and activities held between 7 pm and midnight on Saturday, aimed at participants aged 16 and above.

It’s a new edition of Barcelona Draws, a festival held every year at the end of this month… because Pablo Picasso’s birthday was precisely on October 25th. The event was born from an international meeting (The Big Draw), but it has taken on Barcelona’s characteristics and is celebrated on Picasso-related dates. Take advantage of this year to celebrate, by drawing, the fifty years since Picasso’s death and the sixty years since the opening of the Picasso Museum Barcelona.

If you don’t want to miss Barcelona Draws, the grand drawing celebration, check the festival’s website here and register for the activity or activities you’d like to participate in.