Maple Leaf Houses (Plus New Spray Bottle)

7/21/17 water-soluble colored pencils

Whenever I sketch at Maple Leaf Park, I find myself compelled to sketch the historic water tower that dominates the park and landscape. Since I sketch at the park so often, I decided I should find a different focal point once in a while. On this visit I ignored the water tower completely and instead sketched the houses and trees on one side of it.

The Honest Co. hand sanitizer spray bottle

Technical note: For my spraying technique, I had been using a tiny travel-size perfume atomizer. It works well enough (it made it onto my Top 10 last year), but I’ve been looking for one with a finer mist. Shortly before we left for Chicago, Greg was shopping at Target for travel-size products and picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer, thinking it might work for my sketching needs. I cleaned it out, and sure enough, it puts out a wider but finer mist than the perfume atomizer I had been using. 

This was the first sketch I tried with the new spray bottle. The trees got a little blurry because I was holding the nozzle at the same distance that I used to hold the tiny atomizer, which is too close for the new bottle’s wider but finer output of water. I get the best results when I hold it about an arm’s length from the sketch.