I was meeting friends for lunch in Westbury and went a little early so I could sketch for a bit before going to the restaurant. I drove into Eisenhower Park in East Meadow and found this unusual building. I have no idea what it is used for but I liked it and did a quick sketch.
The Patchogue Sketch Club was meeting, but the forecast was once again for rain so we moved to an indoor location. I brought along some fruit to use for sketching and Mark and Teresa sketched it too.
I like finding marine related buildings like this one in Islip. It is fun to sketch the vehicles and details.
The trees down by the beach in Sayville have unusual shapes do to being exposed to the wind from the Great South Bay. They are gnarly and mishapen, but beautiful anyway.
The north fork of Long Island is home to quite a few big nurseries. It is the perfect place to do some plant shopping. The plants by the greenhouses at Lewin Farms in Calverton always look good.
Over the weekend I took a ride to visit my sister, Mickey who lives in Waldwick, NJ. It was a nice day so we took a ride over to Borough Park in Waldwick. I was able to do a sketch and we also got to log in a few steps while we were there. Across the water there was a deer feeding on the plants.
The Fire Island Lighthouse can be clearly seen from the parking lot across the bay from the island itself at Captree State Park.
In Bellport there is a street that runs parallel to the water at the end of Bellport Lane. The street goes up a hill after you pass the entrance to the Bellport Dock. With the flowers in bloom it looks really nice.
A prompt for the Creative Spark Scavenger Hunt was "related to exercise." I pass this banch of LA Fitness in Patchogue quite often and it fits the bill.
There has been a lot of road and utility construction going on all over this area. Recently I spotted a group of workers digging and doing something on one of the corners of my street. Of course there were a lot of workmen, but it seemed like only two were doing anything. lol
One of the promps for the Creative Spark Scavenger Hunt was "having to do with gardening." I took a ride over to Mama Farm owned by the actress, Isabella Rossellini in Brookhaven. Imagine my excitement to find a young woman actually sitting with flats of plants to go in the field. What a find!
The Creative Spark Scavenger Hunt date was coming to a close so I decided to put some of the items into one still life and do a continuous line. The items were something in a box (toothpicks), used for cleaning (Simple Green), used for cooking (wooden spoon), soft or squishy (the duck), smooth (the Keenex box), and crunchy (tortilla chips).
The NYC Urban Sketchers offers some workshops each year. Shawne Cooper, a friend of mine was offering what sounded like an interesting workshop called "From Sketches to Stories." It involved not only sketching but writing too. I decided to join in. The original location was supposed to be the Elizabeth Street Garden, but rain was forecast for the day, so a decision was made to hold the workshop at Pier 57, a very welcoming indoor location looking out at Little Island.
Shawne showed a variety of her sketchbook pages where she used writing to correspond with her sketch. We were given a page of photos of planting arrangements (pots, urns, etc) from Elizabeth Street Garden. Using tempera sticks we blocked in a solid shape for the item we chose. Once it was dry our assignment was to fill the solid area with our reaction to the change in location. This we did with marker on the shape we had created. Here is mine.
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| The group at work inside Pier 57 |
The architecture and the assortment of people at Grand Central could keep me sketching for quite a while and it never gets old. I like sketching the view with the tunnels receding to the various tracks, subway lines, as well as the LIRR and Metro North trains. We had a good number of sketchers since it was a good location where we could sketch and stay dry. The guards had several rules including no sketching while sitting on the stairs and no sketchbooks could be on the floor while we were painting. Most of us bring along a stool to sit on and usually paint holding our sketchbooks in our laps. It works well.
A rainy day required an indoor location so the NYC Urban Sketchers changed our outdoor location to Grand Central Station. We arrive at Grand Central Madison which is the newer end of the terminal and a very long walk to the original part of Grand Central that everyone thinks of when they hear it. Also those trains are 15 floors below ground level...yes, 15 floors!!! My first sketch of the day was done by Track 24 of Metro North. The train destined for Stamford was sitting there at the track with one of the train employees standing on the platform. What caught my attention was the posture of the workers right in front of me as he leaned against the railing with his elbow propped up. He did move a few times and additional workers joined him for a few minutes. During that time I worked on sketching the train itself. Luckily it remained in place for long enough for me to get most of the details. (I took a photo just in case.) After it pulled away and the man moved away I was able to add in some of the details for the track itself.
I was really happy with the way this came out.
Last week the Patchogue Sketch Club met at Starbucks. The theme was paper airplanes, which I had absolutely no interest in doing. Luckily there is always a view to sketch at Starbucks, even if most of them all look the same. This one has a drive-thru so I was able to catch a barrister with headphones by the window.
There are a few marinas in Patchogue that are fun to sketch from outside the fence like this one.
I knew there would be some trees in bloom at a certain location in Oakdale along Sunrise Highway's service road. There are some corporate buildings and a large grassy area with some pink blossoming trees across the lawn.
One of the items for a recent Creative Spark Scavenger Hunt was "something in a can." I had bought a few cans of anchovies as a treat for Jerry to have on his pizza. I wanted not part of them...just the colorful can. That color was hard to resist. I made sure to hide this one so it would still be around when I was ready to sketch it. I used mostly Posca markers for this.
Ildikó Kerasay did a lesson for Sketchbook Revival called. "Dandelion, herb or weed." She gave a lot of information on the properties of the HERB, dandelion. We were able to sketch the parts of the dandelion either from the references she was using or find our own. It took me a while to find some dandelions and sketch their parts. I was surprised that they were actually difficult to remove from the ground...small but mighty.
