This action going on in our backyard.

Last Saturday I donated my 1995 Ford Escort to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. We scheduled a pick up and just before the appointed time I figured I’d take the opportunity to sketch my old mechanical companion one last time. I did the line work rapidly, as I had only about ten minutes before the appointed time; but the driver was late, so I spent more time on the watercolor than usual. Fourteen years and 100,000 miles! It stranded me once or twice, but was a good car overall.

Here’s a good quote:

At this point, don’t aspire to be great, or even to be original. Aspire to be prolific. That’s an aspiration you can control, and one that can lead — in less time than you might think — to greatness and originality.

That’s from Freehand Drawing & Discovery Urban Sketching and Concept Drawing for Designers by James Richards. It’s a highly-recommendable book on location sketching and much more.

Just a quick one – it’s a trick drawing / painting while standing up. Behind them is a mirror and you can see me reflected in it drawing this

I went to water our community garden plot over the weekend and captured some moments there.

I saw these carefully pruned trees in a commercial area of Pasadena the other day, and thought they were funny enough to sketch. After a while I kind of got upset, thinking, “Who does this to a tree?” My first thought was of someone so uncomfortable with Nature’s random beauty that they had to square it off. Then it occurred to me that these are probably not trees at all, in fact they’re more than likely shrubs that grew up to tree-size, and they were probably always squared off, so why stop? It’s actually very funny, intentionally or not. I’d like to think it’s intentional.

The Castle Green – the old Green Hotel. A beautiful old Moroccan-style building from the late 1800s, early 1900s with an interesting history.

Looking East on Waverly Place – near Concept Design Academy.

This was a quick fountain pen sketch that I went back and colored in Photoshop.

Nice older lady paying her bill. I should have drawn her dog too. Oh well.

Sometimes they make you wait in the exam room with your animal. Felix (the cat, of course) was getting restless and wanted to jump on the other table with the doctor’s things. After several attempts, I let him do it just to see what he’d do. He hid behind the doctor’s monitor, thinking he was safe. Silly cat.