Yesterday I went on a family trip with my wife and son. We took with us some snacks, a cooler with ice, water, some cheese, yogurt and home-made ceviche for lunch. We drove to Guajataca, which is in between Quebradillas and Isabela, at the northwest part of the island. It was a beautiful and breezy day. We took turns driving, so both of us did our warm-up sketches on the freeway. After we had lunch we spent some time sketching. I managed to do just a few, as I wasn’t feeling that well, so we missed sketching at the most interesting spots. We’ll be back then sometime.
I did something I’d never done, that is doing two versions of the same sketch. In the first one I sketched directly with watercolors and in the second version I painted first with watercolors and then loosely sketched over the colors with ultra-fine Sharpie:
We wanted to sketch again today, but we were really tired to go out. I remembered I had seen a blog that people used Google Street View as a resource for visiting interesting locations to paint. We could have done it on our own and select any city we wanted, but decided it would be fun to participate with them, doing the same location as everybody else is doing this month, which is Cape Town, South Africa. Here is my sketch, done with watercolors and a sepia Pigma Micron:
It felt a bit weird; first, I’m not used to drawing from pictures, second, Google’s Street View photographs are taken higher than eye-level and third, you don’t feel the space. You don’t have the smells, sounds or the local coffee I like to enjoy wherever I visit. But hey, I don’t know if I’ll ever go to South Africa, and if I go, probably wouldn’t find this view. In short, it is not the real thing, but still fun to do it. I guess I will be doing some more of these.