Cinque Terre

On one of our visits to Italy we traveled up to the Cinque Terre. It was such a pretty place with several towns perched on cliffs and rocks overlooking the water. I can remember waling all the way out along the  cliff and sitting and sketching the view back toward the town. We also met the guidebook author, Rick Steves when we were there. He was very gracious and loved my sketch. This is one of my travel sketches for the NYC Urban Sketchers theme for this past week. This was done from one of my photos.

La Jolla

For a theme this week the NYC Urban Sketchers is "Let's Go Traveling." Since we can't do it in real life we are traveling to places we loved, plan to travel to, or wish we could travel to. I have many memories of vacations in southern CA visiting my sister and her family. We spent a lot of time in La Jolla. I once told my sister that if she found me an apartment there I would move out there. This was found using Google Street Maps.

Dream Vacation Sketches

The NYC Urban Sketchers met today and sketched our "dream vacation" spot. For a location this morning I decided to "travel" some place I haven't been yet, but that has always fascinated me. 
I am now quite jet lagged after traveling all the way to Bali, Indonesia, a place I've dreamed about visiting, but the distance always stopped me before. 
Thanks to Google images I visited Ulum Danu Temple.

While doing my virtual vacation in Bali, Indonesia I also sketched one of the old stone statues. I used a Google royalty free image to sketch this.

In the afternoon, Mark added an additional challenge to the event. We selected another "dream vacation" spot, but this time we had the addition of a time machine to take us to that location at some time in the past or some time in the future. I immediately knew I wanted to go back in time to Monet's Garden and paint with Claude. So my story is that I ran into Claude Monet in Giverny, and he invited me back to his home to sketch with him. 

I used a photo of Monet which I changed a bit and one of my sketches that I had done at Monet's Garden in the past as a reference for the garden.

Virtual Travel Sketching with Google Maps

For the last few days Mark Leibowitz, who organizes the NYC Urban Sketchers, has been tantalizing us with the following sketch of his. We were given several links to get ourselves familiar with using Google Maps, because that was how we were going to do our weekly sketch event this weekend.

Digital sketch by Mark Leibowitz using Procreate.

It turns out that our destination was Amsterdam, where so many of us had attended the last Urban Sketchers Symposium. For the morning we were given a link to a particular area, but we had the freedom to wander around and pick a view nearby. Imagine my surprise to click on the link and find that I was right outside the apartment that I had rented when I was there. lol So of course I didn't really move around much because I wanted to do that view which included the apartment door, the canal, a houseboat, some typical Dutch architecture and the obligatory bicycles. My apartment is the one on the far right with the planter filled with flowers.

We took a lunch break and then Mark gave us a second link, this time to the area near the Rembrandt Museum. I took a bit of a walk on Google Maps and found this interesting shop.

Sketching today brought back some really good memories of my time in Amsterdam. The only thing I didn't miss was the days of 100 degree temperatures!