A few more marker sketches

It's interesting to do these marker sketches, because I feel I can spend more time laying them out and less time hatching, as the markers take care of the value pretty quickly.  I've been using a Stillman & Birn sketchbook for the first time with these, and so far it's great with wet media like Tombow markers.

Water tower in Federal Heights, Denver

This was sketched from inside the car.  It's near a hospital, and apparently this street serves as overflow employee parking, as there were people in scrubs getting in and out of these cars all day.  When I arrived, the sun was out and casting the nice shadow on the base of the tower you see here.  As I began laying in values with the markers, it clouded up and rained, and just about all of the shadows disappeared.  Fortunately I had penciled in the location of the shadow early on, or this would be a pretty dull sketch.


Wooden derrick in the rotunda of the Western History and Genealogy dept, Denver Public Library

This space is one floor above the reference area I sketched on Sunday of this week.  I spent almost an hour laying out the derrick in pencil, which is probably the longest I've spent on a preliminary pencil sketch in a long time.  But once that was done, the rest of the sketch seemed to fly by.