8/8/11 - I See You Up There!

I really like sketching the back sides of buildings with their fire exits and random wires and cables.  While I was quickly sketching this image, I saw a guy walking around on the roof of the State Bank and Trust building.  I see you up there!

8/04/11 Dead Fly

My coworker Elliott found a dead fly yesterday at work and I said I wanted to sketch him.  Elliott suggested that I draw him at life-size, so I did.  Twice.  One of these three is the real dead fly and, if you can't figure out which one, you should get your eyes checked.

8/03/11 - War Memorial

After drawing the crazy dead guy, I turned my sketching efforts to this war memorial in Island Park.  It's a metal statue of a soldier atop a massive granite base.  I really like old statues in parks and I often feel like they get forgotten.  Maybe sometime I'll draw the front of this one!  The soldier turned out really well, I think.  I like the shadows.

(detail)

8/03/11 - Corpse?

Not a particularily good sketch, but a funny story.  This guy was sunbathing in the park, face down in the grass.  No blanket, no towel, just a pasty bald guy lying in the middle of the park.  It looked like a CSI situation.  He eventually moved.

Failure!

I guess I'm failing at this 'every day' sketching adventure.  We'll have to work on that!

7/29/11 - Spoon Reflections

So the basic idea here was that I'm waiting for a friend so we can eat dinner and I'm kind of starving so I ate some peanut butter straight out of the jar with a spoon.  I set the spoon on the glossy-black coffee table and noticed how the room was reflected in the bowl and the spoon was reflected on the table.  Then I made a fairly crappy sketch.  Sorry it isn't better, but it's Friday night and I have plans.

7/28/11 - Frederick & the Glass End Table

I was super busy yesterday and didn't have time to upload yesterday's sketch, so here it is now.  Sorry.

This is my friend Frederick, he is a spider plant.  Yes, he is having babies, but he is still a boy.  I hope that's ok with you.  He currently resides on my favorite glass-topped end table near the window where he can bask in the sun and shoot out more babies.  Sorry for the bad image, the lighting wasn't great when I took the picture.

7/27/11 - Fire Hydrant

This is a fire hydrant from the US Bank Plaza in downtown Fargo.  I drew it today right after some old farmer I had never met approached me to tell me that I should get a job "threshing wheat".  I responded with "huh?"  He replied, "Combining. It would be good for you to get a job combining wheat when you get to be 18 or 20 years old." For the record, I'm 26.  Then I drew the hydrant.  Good story.

7/26/11 - Bee and Coneflower

This was from yesterday but I wanted to include it because I think it turned out well.  I was just drawing the flower when the bee happened to land and, after asking him kindly to hold still, he proved to be a very good model.  Stood still the whole time until I was finished!

The New Project!

It's been a long time since I've kept a blog, but I think this will be a pretty cool adventure.

May 2012 will mark my graduation from NDSU's Masters of Architecture program and, to be honest, I have no idea what I want to do with my degree.  I've been concerned lately that buildings aren't really all that exciting to me, but I know that I want to be designing something.  At the end of last semester I stopped sketching which lead to a loss of creative thinking in general.  I felt like I had whatever writers-block would be for designers.  I decided that I needed to do something to spark my creativity again.

I got the idea for this blog from the New York fashion design duo Shipley & Halmos who have a section of their website called Numerous Drawings devoted to images from their sketchbooks.  My thought is, if I produce at least one good sketch per day, I'll eventually get my design groove back and, hopefully, figure out some direction for after graduation.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the images!

Kind regards,

Nathan
Sketcher Extraordinaire