We took a short trip to Destin, Florida for a wedding over last weekend. There were several opportunities to sketch so I’ll post five of them over the next five days, in consecutive order.
These sketches are going to be examples of stuff you can sketch on a vacation. You don’t have to sketch “all beauty, all the time”. It can be fun to sketch whatever is available in a particular situation.
As always, you learn as you study the subject, beauty or not.
This one is a view of the condos across the highway from our hotel room. We were on the fourth floor. That provided a different angle, semi-aerial. The colors were bland…just one green roof, the turquoise Gulf of Mexico, and a ground cover of pale green palm trees galore. It’s tough to make “pretty” out of that but sketching it anyway is good for the mind.
There were condos to either side of this building but my sketchbook is a small one. So, all you get is one building.
Yes, the eyes went crossed several times getting all those windows. This was a real test of patience.
4 Comments
Very cool! I really like the spontaneity you achieved, which I know if difficult with huge geometric things (at least for me, anyway). I guess I need to practice on that then.
Thanks Ian for reading and the comment!
I would say it’s more impatience than spontaneity
But hey, what’s the difference eh?
Once you become accustomed to sketching with crossed eyes it gets easier to tackle subjects like this.
Hey, Don. Great sketch. Out of curiosity, how long did it take you to do that sketch? (I’m always surprised by what seems like a long time for me to do sketches of any kind, but particularly those involving multiple windows and such.)
Hi Karen,
Eight minutes.
Hah! gotcha!
Seriously it took around one and a half hours total including the color which was minimal. By far, matching where I was on the sketch with the building when I looked at it, was the hardest part.
It’s like looking up from reading a book, then trying to find the place you stopped again. The top row was slightly different that the rest and the front corner vertical set of balconies was different than the rest.
All the differences were subtle at this distance, which made them hard to pick up without a lot of study.
The trick:
Get an entire column of suites correct, then repeat for the next column until it changes. In hindsight, attacking it in rows might have been easier. Also, I laid it out in pencil, then inked it.
I would have been defeated by error had I only used ink. Or, it would have taken twice as long had I the patience to insure no error would occur before laying a line.
Post a Comment