Visual Journaling Sketch-UP

Had a great day today sketching with the MCBA visual journal collective Sketch-UP. I spent three hours sketching from the 23rd floor of the Crown Plaza Hotel in St. Paul, MN. I really think the best part was seeing everyone else's versions of the view. Here are my sketches from the day. I will try to link to other people's views as I see them posted.

Roz Stendahl is the organizer of the MCBA visual journal collective. The group meets once a month on the 3rd Monday from 7-9p.m. She has a great blog where she talks about the events of the day sketching. See Roz's blog.

You can also see the urban sketchers blog by Ken Avidor about the event.

Saturday Morning

While having my coffee this morning I spent some time playing around with some new drawing materials that I just bought this week.

I picked up a Pentel brush tipped ink pen; it has india ink in a cartridge that is refillable and a real paint brush tip. I enjoy drawing with it and look forward to continued experiments. I also picked up my first Niji water brush, mostly to use while out and about sketching, but it was handy to use while curled up in a chair as well. The only tricky thing seems to be filling it with water. In order to use the water brush I broke out the Derwent watercolor pencils - always fun. All in all it was a good morning sketching!

City Sketch

Here is my finished submission in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Foot in the Door 4 show. Had a few moments when I wasn't sure exactly how I was finishing this, but finish I did. It is submitted and will be on display with all of the other Minnesota artists' work until June.
Now I just need to stay in my studio and finish a couple of the other projects I started along with this one!

Book Project

I am really stuck and wish I wasn't pushing a deadline to get this project done, as now that I have it at this point I am not sure how to finish. My original plan was to draw images of people doing things in the city in each little window and now I am not sold on that idea. I am going over the watercolor with an ink drawing. It is what to do with the windows. I may end p cutting them out, or reusing close-ups of the buildings. Oh well back to cover my boards and ink at least I will be moving forward.