Colorado Sketches Dillon Trial Run 2

Colorado Sketches Dillon Trial Run 2, a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

I have been working an approach for a series of drawings based on quick pencil sketches I made back in the 1980s in a small sketchbook that I took along on a trip to Colorado. This past week, I have been creating new versions of the original sketches by transferring the images into a new sketchbook with graphite paper. Then I have been drawing back into the images with conte crayon and fine-line marker (and posting them here). Although I like the drawings well enough, I still wasn't getting to what I wanted for this series. Yesterday, while I was up at the studio at Porter Mills, I took a close look at another series of drawings I did a few years ago. (I call them transformational drawings; you can search my images for them here if you like.) Although my transformational drawings are different media (pastel and pencil over acrylic), I like the style and would like this new Colorado sketchbook series to have a similar look. So this morning I thought about all this. I decided to add vertical and horizontal lines near the borders, as in my transformational drawings. I also realized this would make it easy to add the name of the location, as I had done in some of my quick pencil sketches. All of this was adding up to starting again. Even when you love to make art, and I do, it can be discouraging to start over. But I remembered an abandoned version of the Dillon sketch that I had transferred to the new sketchbook but then rejected because of smudged graphite on the paper. I decided touse it this to try out my idea. First I erased as much of the smudge as possible. Then I put down graphite paper again and added the vertical and horizontal lines with a ruler, and wrote in the place name, "Dillon". I used fine-line marker again, but this time a lighter blue. Then I added soft, pastel colors with conte crayon, using the vertical and horizontal areas as part of the composition. I was much happier with the result, and this is definitely the direction I am going to go with this series.