Urban Sketching : Denver: April 2014

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

You are Here--Making Maps of the Imagination

“Mapmaking fulfills one of our deepest desires: understanding the world around us and our place in it. But maps need not show just continents and oceans: there are maps to heaven and hell; to happiness and despair; maps of moods, matrimony, culture, from Gulliver’s Island to Gilligan’s Island; speculative maps of the world before it was known; and maps to secret places known only to the mapmaker. Artist’s maps show another kind of uncharted realm: the imagination. What all these maps have in common is their creators’ willingness to venture beyond the boundaries of geography or convention.” –from You are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The Market on Larimer Street

It's been chilly these past few mornings, so we headed inside The Market on Larimer Street.

Here we are showing our works in progress.... completed drawings soon to come!

Monday, April 14, 2014

The Tattered Cover LoDo

Crazy snow! So here we are indoors at The Tattered Cover bookstore downtown today.... Using our imaginations to draw on site and into images that we find in these fantastic books and back out again... The goal is to play around with scale and space.

Drawings soon to come!

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

The 16th Street Mall

Finally a day to go out on the streets to draw Denver's famous 16th Street Mall!

Images soon to come!

Monday, April 7, 2014

Denver City Views

"Whether they're drawing from a window, a roof, or a hill, urban sketchers relish the opportunity to draw above ground level. The effort to find an elevated location pays off when you can draw a panoramic view." --from The Art of Urban Sketching by Gabriel Campanario, pg. 256

Here are some great views of Denver above, to the side, and below... shifting perspectives and points of view. We had the great advantage of access to the top floor of the CU Building, which is just across Speer Blvd. near the corner of 14th and Lawrence. There were fantastic views of the city from the DAC and DD computer labs as well as many of the office and side spaces.

Sketch by artist Jeanine Strasia

Sketch by artist Jessica Gutierrez

Sketch by artist Archie Dalton

"Most sketchers agree that patience is step number one for drawing architecture." pg. 262

Sketch by artist Archie Dalton

Sketch by artist Ethan Sares

With these pieces, we were working on the upper view to the side, and then the downward perspective view, in looking to the streets below us. We also experimented with speed, working fast or slow across the spread of our books.