“Untethered” Sketches

5/16/24 Maple Leaf neighborhood. On a golden hour walk,
I found the distant downtown buildings to look more silvery than gold.
As I sketched, a bird nearby caught my attention, so I quickly used the
Merlin app to identify it while also trying not to lose the rapidly falling light.
OK, I guess this sketch does have a story!

Although it may seem like all my urban sketches are now taking a comics-like form, I still make some one-off sketches on location that have no sequence or inherent story. (And some one-off sketches do have a full story – at least told in words.) My current focus on the comics approach, however, makes those sketches feel incomplete in some way – like I left the scene without finding one more sketch that would have given the first sketch more context. Regardless, I value all sketches, even the ones that now feel story-less. They are simply part of a different process.

5/17/24 Ducks near Green Lake

6/6/24 Rabbit seen on my walk

I recently read Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage, a sketchbook diary about the comic artist’s travels through Europe. Initially, I thought all of the exquisite brush pen drawings were made on location, but that’s not the case; I think many were done with photo references and from imagination. Nonetheless, they were all done during the trip itself, not afterwards, and are impressively finished drawings that do not look “sketchy” at all.

5/23/24 Roofers at our neighbor's house (On second thought, I think this qualifies as comics.)

This quotation from Thompson’s book resonated with me and helped me identify the difference between a comics sequence and a one-off sketch:

A page of comics has its home – in a story; in a book. But a sketch is untethered, exposing process. The lines themselves aren’t special, but the memory attached to the stillness while making those lines.

Whether a sketch is part of a sequence or “untethered,” it always becomes special from the memory of making it. That has always been the most important part of urban sketching: My sketches are not necessarily about “special” moments; they are moments made special because I sketched them.

5/10/24 Maple Leaf. A walk during the golden hour.

6/10/24 Maple Leaf. A sketch for National
Ballpoint Pen Day.