Saturday, February 22, 2014

Winter Weekends at Indeed Brewing


All of these long winter days has lead us to find and explore outlets that get us out of the apartment. With my husband looking at starting a brewery and my pending Architecture Registration Exams we've taken to a form of "hanging out" at local breweries.  More than just enjoying a handcrafted beverage, he gets to try any amount of any beer he wants (usually while chatting with other beer fanatics), whilst I, as a designated sober cab, get to enjoy the opportunity to sketch this trend. With all the new local breweries popping up it's quite a challenge to catch them all!

In architectural drawing there's a constant argument over how to represent people. Should they be shown "hyper-realistic," do they distract from the space, or add to it? Should they be shown as implied, such that the focus is on the building.  Every architect has their own (widely varying) opinion on this. Urban sketching by contrast focuses on drawing on site and capturing the moment as you see it.  In this case I hope I've captured a semblance of both - that is drawing on location and on the spot, but influenced by the desire to find this balance between architectural space and the people who inhabit it.



Sunday, February 2, 2014

Audubon at the Bell Museum

 
Wow, after a few months of being holed up studying, having a weekend to actually do something fun was amazing.  Ever so conveniently for myself, this coincided with a Metro Sketchers gathering at the Bell Museum to sketch the second part of the Audubon exhibition. If you're familiar with nature illustration, then you're familiar with the work of John James Audubon, famous for his sketches of birds. Which brings me to an interesting observation of his work that I chose to draw - I omitted the birds. A crime?  I'll pass this one off as artistic license.  While I admire the work of Audubon greatly, in this piece I was more struck by the dramatic landscape then the large birds originally drawn in (one on top of each cliff).  The birds in flight were added later in order to help lead the eye through the rocks.