People watching drawing

Sometimes I sketch a street, a building, something from the urban landscape around me. And it just doesn’t look right. Usually what I missing is the people. People passing by, crowds, the lon…

...the Observational Drawing, Urban Sketching and Sketchbookery of...

There's a New Yorker magazine cartoon from the 1950s which I loved when I was young. It shows a man watching tiny figures walk out of a storefront. The caption is something like, "I just wound them up, and gave them their freedom." I can't find this in the New Yorker cartoon archive, but I know it was there. So here I was in the Tysons Corner Mall, and I just found the little walkers, wound them up and gave them their freedom to walk around the Mall and consume stuff. Meanwhile, I drew them…

Some of my small space paintings went over the border from "astronomical" to abstract. This is one of them. I was trying out a spatter painting technique over the usual blue nebula, and I wanted to use another color than my usual reds and purples. So I added golden yellow to the picture and got this texture. Then I painted glitzy stars over it. So there's a little bit of Liberace (a famous costumer pianist showman of the 20th century) about this one. I named it "Golden Rain" after a garden…

Sometimes the people in a scene make my sketch come alive. But sometimes, especially kids, capture my attention to where they become front and center of my sketches, and their environment is something that surrounds them and gives them context, but only barely. Which always raises the question, are they Urban Sketches? Some obviously are, […]

People lean against walls to rest in situations where they can’t sit. Leaning against a wall can also look cool and has been used as a position to people watch from. People can lean against a wall when they feel shy and do not want to join a group activity.