This year we are back in Canada for Christmas, and the baby we went to see in 2016 is now a strapping 2 year old, with a baby sister who’s determined to walk and talk as quickly as she can. So life is pretty hectic, but I’m still finding time to do a drawing a day, and the inspiration is even more amazing. The drawing above was done with a small snow shovel, and shortly afterwards it was stamped out by a small pair of boots, but that’s what happens to snow drawings. I drew it today, on day 8 of my holiday.
This time the journey was not nearly as disrupted as the last time, but I still found plenty of time to sketch people on the way.
These two could have been brothers, waiting to board the plane that took us to Auckland, NZ. Their intense concentration and the angle of their heads created a picture just asking to be drawn.
My main focus on this trip is to draw from memory as much as possible. I figure it’s good for the brain and will also sharpen my observation skills. These two were sprawled across three seats with their mother on the long haul flight from Auckland to Vancouver, on December 14 Australia time. I saw them as I was taking a trip to the toilet, and drew them from memory when I got back to my own seat.
We spent the night near Vancouver airport at the Sandman Hotel, and this is my sketch of Moxie’s restaurant after we’d tanked up on our first Canadian breakfast. The group on the left had just left, so I was trying to recall what they looked like – I remember the small man was reassuring the other two, as if to say he’d fix the deal. I knew the third man was taller, so in the revised sketch below, completed 4 days later, I drew what I thought he might have looked like.
I’m using a mixture of fountain pen, waterproof felt pen and watercolour pencil in this sketch, on watercolour paper. The Moleskine sketchbook is an ideal size for travelling, about the same size as a small paperback book. The story continues in my next post, Drawing from Memory.
You can also see my daily sketches on my Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/dogs_pigs_n_rabbits and the Black Dog Studio Facebook page.
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