Colorado Sketchbook Dillon 1

Colorado Sketchbook Dillon 1, a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

This is a sketch that I made sometime in the 1980s during a summer car trip in the Colorado mountains. This sketch is one of many in a small 5 x 8 inch sketchbook. My daughter recently found the sketchbook, which had gotten mixed in with her things during our moving out and moving in to the studio that we share. Anyway, I remember using this sketchbook to try to capture the lines of the mountains as we drove along. (I guess this was one of my first forays into capturing images from a the passenger seat of a moving car, but now I use my cell phone camera!) Sometimes I wrote down approximately where we were; this one was near Dillon. I have been thinking about these little drawings and what to do about them. I like their simplicity, and the immediacy of the line. But I also want to create something more from them, and have been fighting the urge to draw into them with pastel, markers, or pencils. My idea is to make something like the transformational drawings I did a few years ago. (To see them, search for "transformational drawing" on this site.) Well, I worked out a way to both keep the original sketches just as they are, and also use them sketches for something new. The first step is scanning each original sketch into the computer, and saving it as a digital image, which is what I did with this one, and the result is the image that you see here. The next step is making a new copy of the sketch. To do that, I printed out the digital version on computer paper. Then I cropped out the 5 x 8 image, put it over a piece of graphite paper, and retraced the lines onto a new mixed media sketchbook (also 5 x 8) that I bought for this purpose. (I draw over a copy on computer paper so I don't ruin the original sketch.) So that's what I did today, and everything worked. The next step will be to draw into the "new" version of the drawing with pastels, pencils, markers. I think this is going to be fun, and a good project for my home studio, with computer and printer close by.