Speed Sketching at Yellowstone

9/19/13 Liberty Cap at Mammoth
(Diamine Chocolate Brown ink, 100 lb. paper)

For the kind of sketching I do, I usually have better results if I spend less time rather than more. The few times I have spent more than an hour on a sketch (such as my first sketch of Germany’s Köln Cathedral, which took two hours), whatever I gained in detail and accuracy, I lost in freshness and spontaneity.

At no time is it more important to sketch quickly than it is when traveling with other people. I don’t count Greg among those “other people,” because if there’s something worth sketching, there’s certainly something worth photographing, so he’s always busy with his camera. But we were visiting Yellowstone with three family members, and I wasn’t sure how patient they would be. As it turned out, they were all very tolerant of my sketching, for which I was happy and grateful.

9/18/13 Yellowstone Lower Falls, Artist's Point
(Diamine Chocolate Brown, Grey inks, 100 lb. paper)

9/19/13 Dead, gnarly tree
(Diamine Eclipse ink, Zig marker, water-soluble pencil)

9/18/13 Statue of Buffalo Bill Cody in Cody, Wyoming
(Diamine Eclipse ink, Sailor pen, 100 lb. paper)

Nonetheless, not wanting to stretch their limits, I always tried to sketch as quickly as possible. These four sketches from our second and third days at the park were all done in 10 to 15 minutes each. It helped that the weather was dreadful – very cold, rainy, sleety and windy.