Cars Are the New Architecture

12/21/12 Diamine Chocolate Brown ink, Zig and Pitt Big Brush markers

My big sketching bugaboo used to be architecture. Freaked out by the challenge of perspective, I used to avoid sketching buildings whenever possible. Last summer, with many sunny days and no more excuses, I sketched the Green Lake Seattle Public Library, a brick Tudor home I’ve admired, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and several other buildings, and somewhere along the way, I realized I had stopped fearing architecture. Mind you, it’s definitely still a challenge, and probably always will be, but now I actually welcome that challenge.

 

So now I have a new sketching nemesis: cars. What is it about cars that is so friggin’ difficult? They are neither curved and organic like people and animals, nor are they made of straight parallel or perpendicular lines that follow perspective rules the way buildings do. Plus all those shiny, reflective surfaces and curved trim pieces that look so good in glossy magazine ads are a sketcher’s nightmare. Out in the urban landscape, I find myself composing sketches in ways that allow me to avoid including cars, which are, of course, everywhere. The more I reluctantly include a car or two in my sketches, the more I loathe them. I have ruined many otherwise decent sketches when I put a car in the background.

 

But I’m running out of excuses, and I’ve concluded that the long winter ahead would be a good time to sit in my parked car sketching other parked cars. So let’s just call this BMW sketched at a Green Lake parking lot my baseline. Bring ‘em on.