Posts

Showing posts from August, 2010

Box Truck

Image

View northeast from Travis Street

Image
I finally used my new camping chair to do this sketch. I reconnoitered around the Riverwalk area for a while before finally coming up a flight of stairs and finding almost this exact view. I unfolded my chair, put in my headphones and went to work for about 2 1/2 hours. Only one person stopped to ask me a few questions, and she was quite nice-- I think her name was Cathy. Once I had established the location of everything and started most of the hatching, I left to go to work. I continued the hatching over my lunch break and finished everything after I got home.

From a Downtown Starbucks

Image
I drove downtown today on my day off to snoop around for a place to draw. I had my new sketchin' chair in tow, as well as my big hat and map-case sketch bag, and I was fully prepared to set up on a sidewalk somewhere for some outdoor sketching. Only the heat got the better of me, and I found myself inside a Starbucks, ordering a lemonade and looking for a place to sit and cool off. As it happens, there was a table available right next to some floor-to-ceiling windows right on Crockett Street, so I decided to set up shop and draw the parking lot across the street.

Moleskine and SAMA membership

Image
I love the San Antonio Museum of Art, though I confess that since I returned from Montana I hadn't been back until last week. Yesterday I bit the bullet and purchased my first museum membership ever. Now I can visit anytime for free, so you can expect to see a lot of boring sketches of museum sculptures for at least a little while. Also, here's some sketchin' for your amusement.

New sketch bag

Image
I actually went and bought two new sketch bags as a solution to a sort of problem I'm having with my old messenger-style bag, which I sketched back in March of last year. It's big, so I stuff it full of stuff, just in case. Only I never use 99% percent of that stuff. Mostly I just use my pocket moleskine and my Staedtler Pigment Liners, and occasionally my Sakura gel pen or Bogus pad. So I decided to streamline. This one is the perfect size for my pocket moleskine, my regular moleskine, some pens, my iPod and nothing else. It's a lot easier on my shoulders, less conspicuous, and just plain easier to keep with me. I'll draw my other, slightly larger map-case-style bag sooner or later.

Big moleskine update

Image
Lotsa sketches.

From the inside of a Ford Ranger

Image
Can't say why, but I though the 4th floor of the North Star Mall parking garage might give me an interesting vantage point of the buildings along Loop 410, as well as allow me to draw inside my vehicle in the shade (my truck is dark so the cab heats up fast even with the air on). Went nuts on the hatching.

The Smith-Young Tower

Image
I'm baffled. I'm baffled that millions of tourists visit San Antonio each year, many of them to look at and take thousands of pictures of a small, architecturally modest building in Alamo Plaza whose historical significance they don't entirely understand or even care about. I'm baffled that of those tourists, only a handful will ever spend any time looking at another building-- the Tower Life Building née the Smith-Young Tower. Even fewer will devote a portion of their memory cards to documenting the neo-gothic facets of its flattened hexagon shape, its elaborate program of gargoyles, the sun glinting off its emerald roof. Fewer still will bother to learn the name of the building or its place in the history of skyscrapers. There are no restaurants or shops on the stretch of the Riverwalk below this building, and, unless you work there, no reasons to enter the lobby. It sits alone quietly at the far end of downtown away from the convention center and the mega-hot

the Enclave Apartments

Image
You'd think, given my proclivity for San Antonio boosterism, that I would fudge the number of floors in our highrises toward the high end, but I somehow shaved 7 floors from the Enclave apartment tower off Jackson-Keller road. One or two stories omitted here and there doesn't bother me, but for some reason I feel like I've done some sort of injustice to one of SA's tallest residential buildings, and it just looks squat here.

Hondo, Texas

Image
Went west down Hwy 90 recently to Hondo and sketched this here building. Hondo's downtown is strung out along the railroad tracks, so the streetwall faces a whole lot of empty space . Hondo has chosen to put a parking lot in that space adjacent to the tracks. It was hot that day.

Office Supplies

Image
Sketching during my lunch break at work means sketching whatever odds and ends I can find in the back room...