Back-of-envelope baby sketches

OK, as this darling baby kiddo gets older, sketching gets more difficult for me. She's ambitious! She wiggles! She wants to put every darned thing right into her mouth!

But I have been able to whack out a few back-of-an-envelope opportunistic sketches, usually when she drops off to sleep in my lap.

Sometimes those sketches happen on the back on an incoming envelope...

...and sometimes it's on the back of an outgoing envelope. 

(These sketches were from March and April, and she's changed so much already since then!)

The Big Float

A couple weeks ago I participated in "The Big Float," an event where more than a thousand people cross the Willamette River in downtown Portland on inner tubes and other silly floaty things. * Hace un par de semanas, yo participé en un evento llamado “The Big Float.” Más de mil personas cruzaban el río Willamette en el centro de Portland, usando cámaras de rueda y otras cosas absurdos que flotan.

I packed my waterproof sketchbook so I could draw people in their fun costumes before I splashed across the river myself. The waterproof paper held up beautifully to being soaked. I just wish I'd been able to capture the colors of the pool toys and the life vests! * Llevaba mi libro de dibujar hidrófugo para poder dibujar las disfraces de la gente antes de cruzar el río en mi cámara. El papel especial sobrevivió la adventura mojada perfectamente bien. La única cosa triste es que no capturé los colores vivos de todos los jugetes de piscina.


11 more... 11 más...

The Hills of San Luis Obispo

Whenever I travel to the central California coast, I just adore the rolling hills that are dotted craggy old oak trees. As I came into town on the train this summer, my speed-sketching brain of course tried to capture some sense of that distinct and lovely landscape.

Waterscapes from a Moving Train

On my recent 25-hour train trip from Portland, OR to San Luis Obispo, CA, I had a great time sketching the landscapes as quick as I could as they flew by the train windows. This little trio was from when the train entered the northern section of the "Bay Area" of California, near the cities of Martinez and Richmond.

 The stumps of old piers that have long since rotted away are a visual delight.

Using a black brush pen and a gray brush pen really lets me get a scene established fairly quickly, with a degree of depth despite the speed.

Baobabs

The trouble with being a habitual sketcher is that you end up with a billion little pieces of paper with doodles all over them. I'm trying to go through boxes of old paperwork and recycle things, and I came across these pages torn from a work notebook, oh, like, 4 jobs ago? I was working at a botanical garden, and a researcher gave a slideshow of his travels through Madagascar. My notebook pages are covered with quick gesture sketches of baobab trees, of delonix trees, of moringa trees. The crazy swollen trunks, the Dr. Seuss-like squiggles of their branches.

So here I am, recycling, shredding, recycling, shredding, and it all grinds to a halt when I come across weird little doodles like this. They aren't precious, but they kinda are at the same time. Totally throws me off my sorting-through-the-paperwork stride.

Of course, the upside of being a compulsive doodler is that you find these things in boxes every now and then. Heh. 

(For the record, that was a February 2005 lecture by Myron Kimnach.)

Car Guts

Last week I took a work field trip to a local automotive collision center. I couldn't help doing some speed-sketching on my little steno pad! Generally speaking, I'm not that interested in cars, but the interior structures remind me enough of the elaborate shapes and hollow spaces that you'd find in a bird skull, that I really enjoyed seeing the inner workings of the mechanical beasts. We had a newspaper reporter along with the group, and the photographer was very entertained by my efforts--we'll see if any these messy doodles make it into the paper?