Urban Sketches Around The Globe

Someone once asked me, “When you travel, why do you like to draw on-location when you can take a bunch of photos and sketch from them later. Wouldn’t you get to see more that way?”

Sketching for me is an excuse to recharge after a stressful day... a way to get some “me” time when traveling or working with a large group of people. It is typically a quiet, independent exercise of breaking down the scenery into a series of lines, arcs, dots and circles and putting it on paper. It also becomes a way of experiencing a place much more thoroughly than I would if I were just passing through or taking photographs. The events that happen while I’m drawing affect my memory of the place – the sights, smells, temperature, weather, and social interactions. When you draw in a public space, you tend to attract a fair amount of curiosity from other people.

This was a sketch I drew from the Hungerford Bridge of a familiar London scene. If it were just a quick camera snapshot, I wouldn’t remember the hot sun beating on the back of my neck when I started, and then shivering two hours later after it had set behind the buildings. I wouldn’t have met the boy from Spain who loved to draw animals and didn’t want to leave when his parents asked him to… or the two undergrad architecture students who wanted to sketch then decided to take a photo of mine instead. I remember the discomfort of feeling the bridge move under my feet and the frustration of having the wind blow the pages of my journal as I tried to draw. Although this is a black and white drawing, I remember the bright white of the London Eye hovering to my left, the rich tans and yellows of Big Ben in the distance, and the blue-gray waters of the River Thames.

All of these experiences combine to really cement a special place in my memory. I highly recommend on-location drawing to anyone, and if you ever need a drawing partner in Seattle, just holler!

Urban Sketches Around The Globe

Tumbang Preso