I spent a little time at home for the holidays painting from a photo I took in Venice. I'd like to give it another shot, I think I could do better the second time around!
This summer I spent some time in Massachusetts, working at and visiting a theatre I used to work at in the summers. I was able to visit some of my favorite sketching haunts while I was there, and below are the results! I might post the Mount Greylock sketches another day, but for now I'm sticking to the lake. On this particular trip, these were all done within about an hour and a half as a storm rolled in. I had to finish the last one in my car because it started raining! You can still see some raindrops if you look for them.
Started yesterday evening and finished this morning, I did this off a photo I took in Soho a couple weeks ago. Finished with a little white pen for the hottest highlights. Decently happy with how my watercolored graffiti turned out, definitely want to give it another shot on a different project!
Today I did my first NYC Urban Sketchers event! We did the Union Square Holiday market from 11-1, and then after lunch headed over to the Strand. Sketching in the market was fun, but a little crowded. A few people asked me how much I was selling the sketch for! I had existing plans after lunch, but I still got in a quick 20 minute sketch of the Strand! All in all a fun experience, I think I'll be attending more of these!
Tomorrow I'll be going to my first New York Urban Sketchers event. We'll be sketching the Holiday Market at Union Square and afterwards the Strand Bookstore. Since I haven't been sketching much lately I thought it would be a good idea to warm up for tomorrow by sketching from a photo I took (a little uptown of Union Square). I worked with a (fairly) limited palette and was pretty happy with the results. Bring on the sketching!
This is one of my favorites from this summer. I walked through Brooklyn Bridge Park and then camped out for a couple of hours while I painted this. A few passers-by went off the beaten path so they could check it out while in progress!
December 17th for many people was significant to many people as the day they could finally go see the new Star Wars movie. I, too, ended up going to see the movie, after answering a friend's facebook message asking for a buddy with "I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!" Due to a certain level of over-preparedness, I was much earlier than I needed to be, arriving an hour before my friend. Luckily, the theatre had a wonderful view of the street below and I had packed my watercolors (overpreparedness, again, being a theme for the evening.) I settled down to sketch and was soon joined by three adorable girls who were very interested in what I was doing. Below is the result!
What do you do when you have an extra hour in Manhattan between errands and meeting a friend? Hunker down at your favorite cookie place, order a cookie bar the size of your face, and sketch. Here's Schmackary's (on 45th and 9th)!
This was one of my first New York City sketches. My roommate and I were meeting a friend at the movies, and when the friend texted us in transit to say she overslept and couldn't make it, we decided to go to the showing an hour later instead. While waiting for our friend we sat in Union Square, enjoying the gorgeous weather, reading (her) and sketching (me). Before we left to go to the movie, a woman came over to me to ask to see what I was working on. She had been waiting for her husband and watching me sketch from a distance and was wondering how it looked!
The last couple of posts are probably more text-based than the majority of my posts will be. Some of them might be more of a scanned painting with a little blurb. The instagram will be photos taken on my phone while I'm still onsite, the blog will be better scans with the stories behind them. Will also post any other works I'm working on here, as well. The flickr will have all of the images from both the blog and the instagram consolidated in one place. I don't know how often I'll be posting, hopefully at least twice a week. I want to do Flashback Friday posts to get some of my summer work up, and will hopefully have a new sketch per week too. We'll see! It'll be an adventure.
I can't remember when I started drawing and painting, but I'm betting it was pretty young. When I was about eight my parents enrolled me in extracurricular art classes, which I took until I graduated high school. These were supplemented by a pre-college program one summer at Pratt and frequent young artists' workshops at Moore College of Art (convenient, when you grow up in a suburb of Philadelphia). My dad has a story he tells where I told him, at five-years-old, that I wanted to by an artist when I grew up (but when I went to college I wanted to double-major in business because I didn't think you could "just" be an artist. I was a weird five-year-old.). Turns out, I ended up majoring in sc
After I returned from the semester abroad, I got busy with theatre, time passed and I didn't do much drawing at all outside of my school work. I did pick up some sketchbooking, drawing from my imagination and from photos, mostly while in lecture-style classes (sorry, parental units!). After graduating, watercolor became my default medium-of-choice. I moved around a ton and it was easily the most mobile. I dabbled in some plein air painting while in Virginia, and later in Massachusetts, both while doing summerstock theatre. I watercolored from photos and my imagination while living in Alabama. Even though I would paint for fun here and there, I never really made a habit of it. Throughout the
