Scavenge Sketching

Sketching the Agua Selva

From my journal…
Up early again, I walked along the beach away from the village. Catching glimpses of an occasional rooftop above the trees, palm fronds blown down from the night before litter the dry sand. And always the surf, amazingly loud on first arrival but now part of the background. I collect shapes as I walk, leaves, branches, seed pods, a trellis pattern, the faded trim on a veranda, clouds forming on the horizon, someone carrying ice in a burlap bag. All separate and at the same time just part of things. I attempt to tie them together on paper while allowing them to remain independent shapes and colors.

Scavenging for the essence of place

Sometimes I feel like drawing but don’t see anything in particular that I’m interested in. I really wanted to capture the flavor of this cool place, but that was not to be found in anything in particular. A little trick I play on myself is to just draw anyway, starting with an interesting design in a leaf here, a pattern in something else there, and see if it actually leads to an interesting composition. In this case, my scavenging of elements didn’t seem to work too well for a composition. So later I redrew it in Adobe illustrator, cleaned it up and added color to the shapes. The image below shows the outlines, and then the added colors.

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