Sketchcrawl Results

Sunday, November 29, 2009

I know this is a week late, but as the weather gets colder I find myself getting busier!

We started our crawl in Chelsea Market near the Chelsea Wine Vault, with a good-sized crowd for once:

Sketchcrawl 25 - Chelsea Market looking toward 9th Ave entrance

Sketchcrawl 25 - Sketchers at Chelsea Market, New York

For this next one, I used a dip pen that I'd bought in New Orleans, along with Higgins India ink. It was the first time I used a dip pen "out in the field," so to speak. Surprisingly it wasn't too hard to handle the bottle, ink, paper towels, etc.

Sketchcrawl 25 - In front of Chelsea Wine Vault

Then a bunch of us moved on to the High Line:

Sketchcrawl 25 - The High Line, New York, NY

After that I left the group to meet up with M. and have lunch. All in all, it was a good crawl!

New Orleans Sketchbook

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Sometimes when the weather is beautiful and you're in a new city, it's really hard to stop and sketch ... you just want to keep walking all over and seeing all you can!

Here's a quick sketch looking down Chartres St from near Jackson Square in the French Quarter. The balconies and buildings cast a ton of shadows everywhere.

Chartres & St. Peter Sts, New Orleans

Here's a look down the opposite side, still from a bench near Jackson Square.

Looking out from Jackson Square, New Orleans

And here's a super quick sketch dashed off while waiting for the Magazine Street bus, colored with Faber Castell Pitt Artists pens later:

Waiting for the bus, New Orleans

E, I, E, I, O...

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

'Tis the season for apple-picking ... or at least, it was. After reading the recent feature on apple orchards in Connecticut magazine, I wanted to go sample the harvest for myself. So we set out for Easton a few weekends ago, to a place called Silverman's Farm. When we got there, we found out that apple picking had ended for the season, though families were still mobbing the place for pumpkins and tractor rides. (Tractor rides are like hayrides without the hay, as we came to find out -- at least we got to ride up the hill through the apple orchard and see the view from above.)

It was a typical autumn "country" scene -- kids and parents quaffing cider in little single-serve sippy cups, toddlers trudging around with gourds bigger than their heads, strategically piled bales of hay, the whole works.  But somehow the whole thing reminded me of what Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about in The Unreal America -- nothing was quite, well, genuine. The pumpkins weren't attached to anything -- selecting them from where they sat on the ground was really no different than selecting them from a bin in front of the supermarket. Most of the edibles, jams and jellies in the small market weren't made on the premises; they were made "for" the farm, as the labels indicated, by some wholesaler who made them for lots of similar farm stores. And I believe they even had stuff from that standby specialty brand of all "country" stores, Maine's Stonewall Kitchen (usually found next to their Ohio-based gourmet-foods cousins from Robert Rothschild Farm). I certainly understand why they sell all this stuff, but part of me wishes that these places still actually produced everything (or most of their wares) and didn't have to rely on all the wholesale private-labeled stock. There's no point in shopping at a destination if all I find there is the same stuff I've seen elsewhere with a different label slapped on.

Still, it was a lovely fall day, and I ended up dashing off some super-quick sketches of the animals in the farm's petting zoo.

At Silverman's Farm 1At Silverman's Farm 2




At Silverman's Farm 3

At Silverman's Farm 4At Silverman's Farm 5




At Silverman's Farm 6At Silverman's Farm 7