St Mark's 3

7"X5" Marker on paper

My latest online love affair is with Urban Sketchers. I found the blog first and immediately fell in love with the incredible variety of contributors from all over the world. Membership is by invitation only and the calibre of work is high. I soon realized that there is also a Flickr group, which is open to all comers. I decided that, with my limited opportunities to sketch in the city, I might attempt a membership there. They, like the blog, have certain rules. Only sketches with an urban theme are allowed and no photographs or drawings from photographs. Well there is the rub! In Ontario in the winter, drawing outside from life is well nigh impossible. The fact that I actually live in a city but work in a very small country town also limits my opportunities, as most of my drawings are done in my lunch hour.

Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of confessing that this is not in fact done from life, even though the style might suggest it. I have been practising drawing from photos on my computer screen in the same way that I draw on location, keeping loose and avoiding getting snarled up with detail. Using a limited range of values like this also helps me to assess composition in case I might later want to paint these subjects in some larger format.