Depending on what I have on my work agenda, it's sometimes possible for me to be pretty portable. Like lots of people, my primary tool is often a powerful laptop computer. With a couple days of digital prototype modeling and hand drawn concept work ahead of me at the end of this past week, spending a couple of days being productive somewhere other than my studio seemed reasonable.
As much as I love working in the quiet of my isolated studio, other settings and scenes do help shake things up for me creatively. Lately, Baltimore's harbor and the view of the old Domino Sugars plant from Fells Point have held my fascination. And when I'm not working, I've been feeling the compulsion to draw that scene, again and again. Saturday morning before starting work, took a brisk walk along the boardwalk to a local French bakery to pick up some breakfast pastries. The skies were clear, the water relatively calm, and the reflections from across the harbor soon found me sitting on the edge of the pier doing a quick drawing before coffee and the start of the work day.
clear morning Fells Point, 11-1/2 x 8, Derwent Inktense pencilsThis morning, I was ready to head back up to Marietta but my computer was slogging through a high resolution digital rendering in AutoCAD. You'd think I'd get tired of drawing the same thing over and over, but I see something different every time, and I'm never quite satisfied with any of these sketches, so I drew looking through a light rain and fog while I waited for the computer to finish its work. Maybe one of these days I'll get serious and scale it up to a big pastel, but for now my compulsion is well enough served by doing these sketches in my Moleskine album.
