Sometimes, in life as in making art, it is good to take a break from normal.
My studio work and my sketching (see the Moorman River sketches from late June below) as well as teaching has been rewarding lately. With two upcoming exhibitions in the works as well, I feel more than totally booked up for the next several months.
Sketching above the Moorman River Reservoir Moorman River after the rain stormStarting a second sketch with pencilThe nearly finished first Moorman River watercolor sketch
In fact, my wife and I, separately and together, have been way more than a little busy the past few months with all our daily life stuff, the cyclically and recurring out-of-town and local gigs and work projects that we typically engage in, and one or two of those totally unexpected large life altering events that we either fear or love to experience. Life has certainly kept us on our toes lately!
So, with our anniversary coming up and looking for a bit of a reprieve, we opted to take a few days off. We booked a stay at a very “old school” mountain lodge tucked up in the Blue Ridge adjacent to the National Park. The only things on our agenda were sleeping late, reading, a bit of hiking in the woods, eating simple food served family style, exploring some of the region’s artist’s and artisan’s creations, maybe listening to live jazz and blues while sampling local wines, and watching fireworks on the 4th. Nothing dramatic, just simple pleasures and being together.
Now, for those of you who know me well, it will come as no surprise that I took some sketching gear. That said, I spent more time just being me and less time doing. Yes, I looked at potential locations to sketch and contemplated what I was seeing. I let what I saw and the quiet seep into my bones a bit. Only on the very last day during our trip did I break out the sketch kit.
As the sketch got started: rough gestural pencil sketching and the first layers of color.
As I began working my way through the image, I was trying to let the energy of my experirence and reaction to this lovely place guide me. The quiet of a calm morning, all the softly streaming light filtering through the trees, the fresh mountain creeks, the cool mountain air as it slowly built to the heat of a full summer day, and these iconic folding hills flowing down from the higher peaks at my back.
The finished piece.
Summer Morning View East From Below Doubletop, July 2023, watercolor over pencil, 8”x8”
After I finished this up, it was time for a late breakfast and to load the car and start our journey home. A little more relaxed and refreshed we headed back to the regular world. For me that means my next sketching adventure … teaching at the Chicago Urban Sketchers 2023 Seminar!
As many of you know, I will sketch almost anywhere and at almost any time.
Even when I am busy working on other things!
Just a little over a week ago I got back from out West were I was part of a team evaluating student art portfolios from all over the US and beyond for the College Board. Since I have been involved, we’ve done the portfolio “reading” in Louisville KY and Cincinnati OH and those are both great places to visit and to sketch. Before Covid, we had started gathering in Salt Lake City UT and this year we returned! Perhaps because I grew up as a flatlander (mostly Florida and some in eastern Kansas during my youth and then another twenty in eastern North Carolina) the Rockies and the Wasatch Range are a great visual treat for me!
Now, besides looking at thousands of truly fantastic art portfolios in-person and digitally, I get to hang out with some fabulous artists and art educators from all over the county. And because of Salt Lake is located in the far western portion of the Mountain time zone, the sun sets up to 45+ minutes later there than it does in a more eastern part of the time zone. In the first week of June, the sun was setting about five minutes before 9pm. That left four hours of daylight after I finished my “day gig” to head out for sketching. Plenty of time!
Bryan Keeping Us Organized During “The Read”, inks and graphite on craft paper, 5″ x 7″
If you know me, you would guess even in our busy day, especially during breaks or lunch, I’m likely to sneak in a few minutes for a quick sketch. For these quick sketches, I used a fountain pens in my kit that is loaded with a water-soluble black ink and opted for my brown craft paper sketchbook. In the sketch above, I also added a bit of graphite and some white from a Uniball Signo Gel Pen.
On the first evening that I and a few compatriots ventured outside into the city to sketch. I used that small sketch book and mostly the same gear. In the sketch below, I was drawing some of the buildings very close to Salt Palace Convention Center near the center of town. The main building in this sketch is the 1st Security Building, originally named the First Fidelity Building and built in 1919. I depicted just some of it’s crisp Neo-classical style decorative detailing, wanting to keep things clean and bold. The blue glass Regent building behind it and the fading but mostly lighter blue sky further back were created using Caran d’Ache Watercolor leads.
1st Security Building, 100 South & Main Street, From the West, ink & watercolor leads on toned paper, 5″x7″
To the front of the 1st Security Building, I included parts of the building (done in black ink and a brown wash of walnut ink) and various plantings and street objects/signage in the street’s meridian or alongside the road. I tried to keep all these shapes out front much more simple, even less “completed” than the 1st Security building. After I finished with the ink and color, I eventually erased many of the still slightly visible organizational pencil lines you can see above.
The next evening I helped gather up a larger cadre of folks to visually explore the City Creek Canyon. We ended up as three groups in slightly separate areas surrounding the creek. The band I was with had decided to venture up State Street to the hill the Utah state capitol is built on. At that location, the hill overlooks Memorial Park down in the City Creek canyon as well as offering a view of the foothills and the Wasatch Range to the east.
View Across The City Creek Canyon Towards The Wasatch Range, watercolor over pencil 5″ x 7″
For my sketch, this time I chose to mainly use watercolor but tried to really simplify the image. I was concentrating on the subtle hues of the mountains while the sun was still mostly overhead. The canopy of trees I was viewing the mountains through where richly shadowed, lush and visually inviting but only I used a small portion of them as a compositional offset for the nearby hill and the view of the more distant mountains.
As I said before, I wasn’t alone in SLC and we had a growing number of folks from within our artist/art-educatorranks who were interested in going out for plein-air and sketching together the next several days. Below are a handful of those folks who joined in and ventured over to Liberty Park a couple of days later. It is a great location, with lots of places for kids and/or adults to play or stroll, several wonderful lakes and ponds, wooded fields and hills, and some great open views of the mountains to the east! It is a perfect place for doing plein-air work or for urban sketching.
Our group of plein-air artists & sketchers were using a wide variety of materials. Some chose inks, pastels, graphite, or charcoal, others concentrated on gouache, watercolor, or oils. Frankly, we only scratched the surface of the metropolitan area but we had spread out across the city and even a bit beyond, recording images from the central city core, the LDS Temple Square, up onto Ensign Peak, and a lot of places in between. It certainly was great fun for me to help all these folks get together to visually explore our host city. And I also have to really thank Gregg for his knowledge of the locale; it was invaluable info.
Above are more of my compatriot’s images from our adventures around the city!
As the time to finish our work and head home approached, I realized that I had not only reconnected with some old friends and dear colleagues that I had not seen in-person since 2019 (before the Covid pandemic) but I had also made some new sketching friends as well. That was a real joy!
Tram and Station near the Union Pacific Depot, Salt Lake City, watercolor and inks, 5″ x 11
I guess it really was a busy and successful trip all the way around!
If you have had a recent sketching adventures, I would love to hear about it.
As we now are moving into the summer season, I look back at the end of spring and realize there was a lot going on and I was awakening from a long quiet fallow season. With the vernal equinox approach, I found myself reorganizing tools. It started with tools and equipment for working around the house and outside in the yard and garden. It quickly transitioned to the art tools in my studio. Then, while decluttering the studio, I began to reorganize all the new digital and video equipment Covid deposited there. Soon, I was transitioning to an even more pleasant flurry of making images both inside and outside the studio.
As a way to help rev up my outside work, I accepted an invitation to join in with a group of fellow sketchers and plein-air artists at the Queen City Plein Air Festival event in the community of Staunton Virginia. It was no surprise to me that it proved to be a joyful task to spend time painting, drawing, and sketching outside in the cool but growing warmth and fresh light of mid-April. Frankly, being around other artists a bit was a nice bonus too.
Sloped Garden w/ Rocks, Staunton
About a week or so later, near the end of April, I was further north in the Shenandoah Valley helping out a very talented former student of mine named Chris Michaels. Chris now teaches art and wanted me to do some demos of watercolor sketching as well as ink & watercolor sketching for his students. A few days before our scheduled event, I began scouting out locations, familiarizing myself with the potential areas we wanted to have his students visually explore. I made a number of photos, quite a few small thumbnails, and stopped to make several more finished sketches myself. One, an ink and color sketch, depicted a row of storefronts on a small city street. The other, shown below, is a watercolor sketch of trees along the much swollen South Fork of the Shenandoah River.
After my presentation, the students were all out sketching and I was able to walk among the students as they worked and to give them tips and encouragement. They were throughly enjoying themselves, many trying out sketching techniques they were using for the very first time. The made some really exciting and wonderful pieces.
Well after lunch, as the afternoon light began to flood the the western sky and horizon, I stopped being an art instructor and art coach. Instead, I dropped back into full artist mode and began sketching. Here, with the sketch above, I wanted to play with the brightly lit buildings of the town and almost wildly jumbled foliage and fields arrayed below the softening silhouette of the Massanutten ridge.
Later, in May, I again joined a group of artists who were gathering for a working retreat at a lodge nestled in the Cowpasture River valley in Bath County, Virginia. As is often the case, I eschewed most of the grander and bolder scenes and chose quieter and more personal views. My first ink and wash sketch (below, right) was made the first evening I was there. The next afternoon I returned to that location where a several tiny rivulets of water join to create a small creek. The Spring colors of budding trees and flowering ground were all around me in the diffused light poured through the wispy thin clouds above.
Later pieces that I made in this upland valley were explorations of gently sloped hilltops seen across open fields or through screens of intervening trees. Most of the time I worked with watercolor but every once in a while I picked up toned papers and or inks as well.
So you can see, the slow coming of Spring blanketed the rivers, fields, hills, and slopes of the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge mountains with soft colors and boldly fresh light. If I needed anything more to reenergize I don’t know what else it could be. While I sketch in cities and the countryside throughout the winter months, I am happily back to regularly sketching and painting outside. That is always exciting; it also pays off with new images and refreshes my work in the studio too.
Please let me know which pieces you find intriguing or if you have any questions about the materials, processes, or techniques that I used.
Sometimes you get to sketch in places you never dreamed you would even be!
That is what I did when we went to Palm Springs; spending a week in a portion of the Sonoran Desert in Southern California. There was so much to I had never seen before, several mountain ranges surrounding the Coachella Valley, the Joshua Tree National Park (where the low Sonoran desert meets the higher Mohave desert), and the California State park at the top of the San Jacinto Mountains.
We had gone there to meet up with our son. We all wanted a get away; to see and spend time together after almost a year and a half of Covid pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions. We walked and hiked together, sat in or around the pool, explored eateries, and just enjoyed time together. The whole trip was a joy; such a privilege!
Of course, for me being tends to mean taking so time for sketching a some photography too.
My first quick 5″ x7″ sketch at the entrance to an open courtyard surrounded by inviting eateries and shops in Palm Springs, California
After spending lots of time together walking, talking, and exploring Palm Springs on foot, I left Mary and Will enjoying a refreshing mid-afternoon soak in the pool. I popped away to further explore with my sketchbook in hand. My first sketch was from inside an open air cafe. I was looking into the adjacent courtyard towards the mountains that rise on the southern edge of town. The courtyard was fill of folks popping into the various shops, galleries, or eateries around the open space. Others simply sat, strolled, or wrangled their happy kids enjoying the fresh air. You can see the sketch is complete but I Haden’t erased any of the predatory pencil lines yet!oachella Valley
Coachella Palms in Early Morning Light, inks and watercolor on grey toned paper, 11 x 5
The early morning light of the desert air is just so enticingly clear. Before the others were up and about, I sat on the balcony and watched the sky change color from a deep azure-violet to a pale pink and finally to a soft muted yellow as the sun rose.
Breaking my entranced gaze and ruining inside for a moment and quickly grabbing my sketch bag and a drawing board, I started an ink sketch of the tall palms that encircled our retreat. I began with a soluble ink in my Waterman Phileas pen and a waterproof ink in my Lamy Safari pen.
Soon the brush was out as I softened the ink and began to add a bit of blue watercolor and a touch of a warm Naples Yellow (it may have a touch of gouache in it too). Before I finished, I also added a bit of white and brown inks too.
Evening View SSW, Coachella Valley and the San Jacinto, watercolor and pencil, 5 x 11
We spent several more days just enjoying the sites and rejuvenating ourselves by walking and even taking a mid-20th century architecture tour. The night before we were all to depart, we had planned a nice meal at an outdoor venue after sunset in the heart of the city. Taking advantage of our last afternoon/evening view from the balcony, I made my last sketch in town. Here is a link to view the making of this small painting.
It is amazing what a respite can do for the heart and the soul. And how much it frees the eye and brain as well.
Sometimes I love complexity. I can revel in the challenge of making visually rich images with multiple techniques, materials, and stylistically diverse elements work together. I will even revel in bringing more than one design strategy into play in a single work. I do that pretty regularly in both my large drawing and my panel painting series.
Grape Hyacinths, ink and watercolor, 7×5, April 2020
Right now though, I am craving simplicity!
Perhaps it is the stress and upheaval that SARS CoV-2 virus and the havoc playing out around the world. Or maybe the sudden separation from all my artist colleagues and students after a year of wonderfully intense sketching activity I’ve had locally and across the country.
Whatever it is, it seems that I am deferring more often to the practice of very direct, improvisational sketching. Notice too that I seem to be deferring to slightly wilder ink lines. My mark making with both pen and brush is nearly the freest, most playful and loosest that I tend touse.
My subject choices seem to differs a bit from my norms as well. In part that is because of the “stay at home” directives but I think think I may just want to keep everything on a basic level. So both of these two are sketches of view right around our house; pots on the front steps and flowers just a few steps down the walkway from the screened-in porch.
Potted Plants and Sprouting Rose Bush, Ink & Watercolor, 5×11, April 2020
it might also be a reaction, a subconscious desire to concentrate the most local and very accessible objects and spend time being more engaged with the natural world. Is there some form of desire to retreat from the world’s complexity at work here? Is it a use of sketching as a salve for all the irritations of our current news cycles?
Truthfully, I don’t know.
Tomatoes on the Table at Lunchtime, Watercolor & Ink over pencil, 5×11, May 2020
I’m not sure that it matter right now if I can figure it out. I am just enjoying working with ink, color and my brushes; looking mostly for the sake of looking. I could talk about the joy of mixing color or the use of silhouettes and negative spaces in sketching. Normally that IS what I would do. But not today.
Staying simple.
PS: To see a video of the Tomatoes being created, click on the link below. Fair warning, it is my first ever video so … it is VERY low tech, has poor timing/editing, and it is silent. What? me, silent? Remember, I am trying to stay a bit simple for now!
WOW, we are a full month into 2020 and I finally feel like I am getting up and running!
2019 was a monster of a year! It was jam packed with all kinds of energy; so many personal and professional challenges too. I can’t complain though. Most of the year went so very right. I sketched all around the country; on the East and West coasts, in the South, Midwest, and South-West and even in the Mountain West. Exploring watercolor, dry sketching media, and combinations of the two, I was pretty happily engaged almost every week. This year I was also invited to teach urban sketching classes and workshops locally, regionally, and in Chicago and San Francisco.
Some images my from 2019 Urban Sketching workshops in San Francisco, Chicago, Richmond VA, Staunton VA, and Fredericksburg, VA
It was an honor as well to be in several exhibitions featuring sketching and/or urban sketching. The most recent was the exhibition One Sketch at A Time: An Exhibition of Urban Sketchers. It included sketchers mostly from around the Washington DC and the Northern Virginia region. The show was held at the Manassas Center for the Arts (you can see images below) just outside of DC.
Three pieces, One Sketch at a Time exhibition
interior of the exhibition
One Sketch at a Time exhibition
Center for the Arts, Manassas
New Ventures?
Ok, I am exploring some new places to show my sketches. And to be sure I am working on finding some new and scheduling old places to teach workshops and classes too. I am also really exited to be getting a two week artist residency in eastern North Carolina this coming fall. As for sketching trips, I am looking at venues in addition to already planned trips to central North Carolina, Florida, Salt Lake, Chicago, DC and a few others. I’m going to have a lot more info on all those very soon.
Right now?
Well, let’s see … Oh yeah, more types of sketching!
In fact, I’m currently working on two strands of sketching. (I guess I like to make things complicated; it keeps me on my toes and experimenting!) Most of you know my normal sketching with watercolor and/or ink. I’ll of course be continuing those, I have to feed my soul. This year, I will also be foregrounding my sketching on toned paper. Working on toned surfaces is something I have been doing for a long, long time but have only rarely shared with anyone. Below are two very recent toned paper sketches!
sketched in a diner in Crozet
sketched in a diner in Emporia
Drawing on toned paper has a long history and can be taken down many new and old paths. A very traditional method, the “trois crayon” technique was quite popular in the Renaissance and Rococo periods. I have usually confined that three color technique and most other toned-paper methods to large (22×30+) preparatory studies for my Mylar based drawings. For now though, I am also going to sharing my experimentations with these wet and dry variations of toned paper techniques in my sketches!
A Winter Evening View of the Beverly Street Studio School Building, inks w/ touches of dry pigment on toned paper
My plan is to work with and show you pieces on both warm and cool papers. I’ll start by posting works with fairly tradition media, either wet and/or dry. I’ll also use watercolor and maybe even a bit of gouache as well. Then, I might just get a bit more jiggy with it.
Now, if you have a favorite technique for sketching on toned paper/surfaces or you have an artist you know of that works on toned papers, I would love to hear from you. I am happy to share your faves (artists or techniques) with everyone here!
I love the light during Autumn. During my career as a full-time art professor, I would sometimes lament that I didn’t get enough time to draw and paint outside in the Fall. Classes, tons of grading, mentoring/advising, meetings, and the earlier and earlier setting of the sun as we moved into late September and through October just made it hard to be outside in the glorious light and the amazingly rich colors.
Yes, I am still teaching a lot … but I now I am somewhat more in control of my schedule and can get more time to explore this beautiful season. And, I can now teach students classes or workshops centered on our mutual visual excitement … Autumn’s beautiful colors. In my last post, we looked at some images as I began my latest workshop, Sketching Fall Foliage w/Watercolor. Here, I am posting my final two demos from that workshop
Thumbnail value study
Thumbnail color study
I pointed out to my students that when we are sketching, many of us tend to jump in and begin making an image right away. That spontaneity can be so very refreshing, even exhilarating. But for our last morning, I suggested that student stop and think, even if for only 2-3 minutes about their composition; about staying true to what it is that excites them about the subject matter. I even suggested that, especially when they are not sure how to begin, that they might do one or more thumbnail sketches. I demonstrated and we talked about a line/shape studies, value studies (above left), and color studies (above right). We even discussed some of the virtues of doing a Notan study.
After I made the thumbnail studies I jumped into actually creating the first new image of the day.
unfinished: East, Towards The Blue Ridge On Rte. 254, watercolor over pencil, 7.5 x 10.5
As I began my demo, I talked about combining the two approaches we had explored the day before, wet into wet and wet on dry. As you can see in the unfinished sketch above, the left side is mostly done in wet-on-dry and the shaded trees on right is executed with wet-into-wet painting. Below, is the more finished version of the sketch.
East, Towards The Blue Ridge On Rte. 254, watercolor over pencil, 7.5 x 10.5
For our last sketch of the day, we work in a field surrounded by lots of different trees. None were majestic, eye popping examples of Fall’s stunning displays of color. Instead, as the clouds grew thicker and greyed the sky, I tried to focus students on “finding” excitement within the normal. I also discussed a use of color that many of you may remember if you ever took a look at Making Color Sing by Jeanne Dobie. For this sketch, I asked students to incorporate at least a limited use of some soft, subtle (chromatically contrasting or complementary) hues to accentuate and enrich the boldness of the colors that we did see.
Trees Behind the Bleachers, 12th & Oak Streets, watercolor over pencil, 5×8
All in all, I think we had a good workshop!
And … my students and I got to be outside making images surrounded by Autumn’s color. For me, that is real treat for the eye and heart!
How often do you return to sketch a location? Do you ever try a very different way of sketching the same place?
Tunnel at Mary’s Rock, 6×9 (this is a demonstration a layered wet on dry watercolor technique and of limiting the image’s area of interest/focus.)
Well, on the Skyline drive about an hour away, there is a really neat locale known as Mary’s Rock; a peak in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The road cuts 600+ feet through the granite outcrop via a tunnel. This is the site that I chose as the subject of these two rather different sketches.
Today I was conducting my Painting and Sketching Fall’s Foliage workshop and I was demonstrating two alternative ways to approach a watercolor. For my first image (below), I worked atop a wet sheet of paper, loading color into wet color passages and employing a good deal of color lifting too.
Tunnel Beneath Mary’s Rock, watercolor 7×11 (This is a demonstration of a wet-into-wet technique with scraping and lifting of color.)
While I love the richness and spontaneity of this approach, I don’t usually work this way across an entire painting’s surface. I tend to like to contrast the fluidity against a bit more concreteness; anchoring the loose and free flow of color to few more solidly placed passages of color or line.
My workshop students seemed to enjoy the excitement of pushing very wet color around and adding extra water, color splattering, soaking up excess liquid, and other tasks to manipulate their images of the tunnel under Mary’s Rock.
For my second demo of the day, I returned to my more normal painting process, a mostly wet on dry approach. I also suggested and attempted to lead them to limiting the area of greatest color and value detail to the section they most wanted to have us focus on. For mine, since I was intrigued by the trees growing to the left of the rock face and the opening of tunnel, that is where I concentrated most of my color and value manipulation … only hinting at the red trees to the far right. I could have painted even less detail and may still erase some the pencil lines delineating the upper edge of the tree line to the right but I will admit that I mostly pleased with this one..
Tunnel at Mary’s Rock, watercolor, 6×9
I’ll post a more the workshop sketches in a day or so; you can find them by clicking here.
After some whirlwind adventures in San Francisco, Chicago and Salt Lake, I am back to my home in Virginia. But within the week I was again teaching an urban sketching workshop.
This one was a weekend long Urban Sketching workshop sponsored by the Beverly Street Studio School (BSSS) in the small city of Staunton. The town, which has lots of Victorian and Edwardian era architecture in its downtown and older neighborhoods, is located near the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley.
My group was a lovely and lively bunch of folks; they weren’t afraid to push beyond some of their comfort zones. That makes teaching a real joy.
My incomplete morning demo piece; I was using direct and blended pencil on paper.
On the bright and clear Saturday morning, we gathered next to an old commercial mill building and adjacent grain silos near the railroad. Our first round of sketches were all made using dry media. Below are two examples of student pieces completed in the Saturday morning session. I think the use of intervening organic and manmade shapes as well as strong value contrasts help make these two really quite good!
After a lunch break we reconvened in an older residential neighborhood, the historic Gospel Hill area, just a bit east of the downtown. Our goal was to use or to include soluble and/or permanent ink in this sketch. In the shade of century old trees, we worked on finding snippets of the architecture or landscape architecture to concentrate on.
Gospel Hill Garden Wall and Steps, Staunton Va This is my very quick second workshop demo piece; I used permanent and water-soluble ink, ink wash, and brush pen, 5×7
After working all afternoon, we had a productive critique there on the sidewalk as residents walked or drove by … probably wondering what we were up too. It was a good day over all.
The next day we worked with various combinations of materials and added color to our sketching toolkit. We did have to compensate for some high winds and we worried a bit about nearby heavy storms. So we gathered at two locations that offered potential protection. Luckily the afternoon thunderstorms skittered by to our northwest and southeast.
Gathering for our final critique under the protective covering of the train station’s platform.
The participants made some fine sketches, I had a lot of fun meeting these new folks, and … jiggidy-jig … it was nice to sleep at home both nights too!
Many thanks to the wonderful folks of the BSSS ( http://bssschool.org ) who invited me to teach this workshop.
I also want to thank the students who signed up, and especially those who were members of the local sketching group known as Sketch Staunton. You can find the group online via Facebook. ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/392125291370828/ )
Salt Lake city is, for the most part, a flat city. But a very high mountain, the Wasatch Front, is so very, very close.
I am here to work evaluating art portfolios for ETS again this year. With that project, I’m staying and working near the center of the city, between the government, LDS Temple. financial, industrial/warehouse, and older residential areas. The week that I am here, my days are pretty full between 8am and 5pm … but it is summer and the light lasts until just shy of 9pm. Perfect for me.
View south at Broadway and Main, Salt Lake City 5 x 11, ink and watercolor over pencil
The other evening, just before a cold front blew into town, a friend of mine and I went downtown to sketch in the center of the commercial and financial district. It was a good location with lots of foot, car, and trolley traffic! Before I was even close to finishing though, the colder air roared in with 50 mph+ gusts. I called it quits despite not having laid in all the colors or textures I had hoped to; the breaks of creating sketches outside.
The A Street Steps, Salt Lake City 5 x 11, ink, ink washes, and watercolor over pencil
Earlier in the week, other friends and I went out after dinner to an older residential neighborhood, known as The Avenues, that overlooks the downtown. The low hills of the area have some steep sides and interrupt a road known as A Street. My subject was the “A Street Steps” that connect the lower section of A Street to the upper portion.
Tonight is my last full day in the city before returning home. I’ll try for at least one more sketch. I am hoping for a full watercolor actually. Maybe I’ll actually get a view of that mountain in this one!
If it works out, I will post that one once I get home.
Sketching ... Always! 