Neighborhood Sketch - 2

Next to the parking lot sketch I made last Monday is the Mount Zion Baptist Church.  I guess I'm ready to capture what's in my work neighborhood.  If only I have more time...  Ballpoint pen for lines and pencil watercolor for the color added at home.  I might make another sketch of this building but with a different media.

Neighborhood Sketch - 1

There's a fitness gym up on the second floor of this black painted building with main access from the side parking lot.  It's located at the corner of our block.  I've always been drawn to the variety of cars and trucks inside this lot and I thought I'd sketch it one day.

  

End of week sketch

I set aside a 30 minute sketch break before heading home last Friday since I had a busy week.  I wanted to unwind by doing a quick sketch.  That half hour turned into a full hour as I started seeing more and more to add to an otherwise simple sketch.  I started with the SUV in front of me and it just grew from there.

 

Neighborhood Sketch

I walked around the neighborhood one evening and found this old building situated within the same block where I work.  At first, the fire escape first caught my eye before I noticed that jumbled mess of wire on the utility pole. 

A corkscrew

We opened a bottle of wine the night before but found the cork still undone the next morning.  Alas, I found a page from my sketchbook where I thought a sketch of the corkscrew would be fitting.  There were several more pages like this where I had pre-marked them for use in my city after-work sketching before the pandemic.

A Rediscovered Sketch

This past January, after an appointment and before reporting to work, I had some extra time to purchase breakfast from the etc store on 5th Avenue .  I took the opportunity to sketch a view of the Empire State Building using one of my pre-marked pages.  The ESB main entrance view was partly hidden by the commercial vehicles parked on this side of the street.   I was going to add more to the scene later but have since forgotten about this sketch.  Now that I found it, I think I'll just leave it the way it is.  A good reminder of the "normal times" before the pandemic altered the way of life as we know it.

Sketching from picture reference

The NYC Urban Sketchers group held a Virtual Sketch, (Not Urban Sketch), of the Grand Central Terminal, thanks to Judy Garza, who provided very interesting tidbits of information of this amazing NYC landmark.  I was glad to "see" my group of sketching community even though it was just thru Zoom video.  For my sketches, I chose a picture of the whispering gallery for the morning session as this was dearly familiar having been a commuter to the city for a year.  For the afternoon session I chose a picture I took of the 42nd Street main entrance as seen from across the Pershing Square Park.  The pre-marked pages came to be handy for this exercise.