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.
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.
Continuing with the theme of cars… This was a moment before going on a recent road trip – getting new tires, alignment and rotation.
This was at a body shop, waiting for an appraisal. I looked over at the Benz on the other side of a glass door, waiting to be picked up or worked on. The custom license plate was an animation term, so I figured it was an animator’s car. Kind of funny.
Cars in the parking lot across from my favorite barber shop…
This was a quick fountain pen sketch made while we were at a Ford dealer, working out the details of buying a new car. I later went back and added some digital color, since I didn’t have time to use the watercolors.
I just now realize that all these sketches were done while waiting for someone or something. Drawing does make the time go by faster. Most of the time I’m disappointed when I have to stop sketching to actually conclude my business. Ha.
This is from last night at our local favorite weekly restaurant. They sat by the window (that’s an SUV parked behind them) and never broke eye contact with each other for, I swear, 45 minutes. I got the feeling they’ve been together a long time.
I decided to try a light pencil underdrawing for this one, which I almost never do – as I usually like to draw directly with the fountain pen and just see what happens, but I wanted a slightly more simplified, cartoony technique than usual. ALSO – this is the first sketch I’ve done with my new Noodler’s Ahab fountain pen – what a fantastic pen! Check out this link for more information on the pen – and a fantastically geeked-out video about, well just about everything you’d want to know about the pen and MORE!
Anthony Zierhut 