Sketchbook: Architecture

Beautiful old San Francisco Eastlake on a corner lot in Pacific Heights. Fresh coat of mint green paint. 

The Burlingame Episcopalian Church

City Sketches

The oft-sketched park. San Francisco.

Carolands Gate House

I took the plunge into the world of Plein Air recently. This is an 8x10 oil on hardboard. It's pretty rough. This is really my first oil ever. It's going to take a lot of practice to get good at this.

On another note, somebody called the cops on me and my friend. The citizens of Hillsborough sent a clear message. Oil painting of historical buildings which happen to be near elementary schools will NOT be tolerated. Anyway, here is my friend Brandon Jones's digital painting from that morning.

City Sketches

More sketches from my corner of the universe.

This is kinda different because it was drawn on a piece of animation paper on a clipboard with a brush pen.

City Sketches

The picnic spot above 5 Guys Burger where the high school kids hang out. 

Mountain Lake park bench.

View of the Transamerica Pyramid from Washington and Taylor. 

The edge of the Presidio at night as the streetlights are coming on. 

Sketches From My Travels

Cities

A bunch of recent city sketches. These are mostly done in the morning before work or on the weekends before breakfast.

SF City Sketches

Out and about in San Francisco.

San Francisco Sketch

At the corner of Franklin and Bush. Sketched from life using a Pilot Pen. I added a couple of gray layers in Photoshop using the lasso tool. Really basic.

Vector Illustration Technique: Shadow Color

This is a watercolor painting technique from a book – it's called a "double wash" – which I simulated in Adobe Illustrator. I break down the process step-by-step in the black boxes below.

Rooflines of Burlingame Ave.

Quick digital sketch from my desk at work in August. We're up on the third floor so we have a great view of downtown Burlingame. I turned my Cintiq towards the window after everybody on that side of the room went home and sketched this right before sunset. It's a rough sketch but it will always remind me of that time of year when the days are long.

Downtown L.A.

I seized the opportunity to sketch on the corner of 11th and Olive downtown Los Angeles on Saturday. Although I lived in L.A. for 2 years, I never made time for city sketch crawls like I do now. I feel like I made up for some lost time this weekend.

Downtown Manhattan

More buildings on State Street. This is near Wall Street.

Sketch Walks

A couple of recent sketches. San Francisco and Palm Springs. The first sketch is a strange mix of Spanish Revival architecture combined with a bungalow court. Palm trees. Stucco. In a city know for it's Victorian/Italianate Row Houses, it definitely stands out, but it's cool.

Some Sketches of Buildings and an Old Volvo

Out and about. Practicing perspective.

City Sketches from Last Weekend

A couple of quick sketches around the city. Really tried to use the colored markers on the downtown sketch but had to pull the saturation way back in Photoshop.

La Jolla, San Diego

I thought this was going to be a neat sketch with the row of palms and everything but the scale is wrong here and the pencil I brought was hard and dull. I should have sketched everything smaller with less detail including the ground plane, which would reveal the true height of those palms. Tall.

The Château in Burlingame

In a nice neighborhood downtown Burlingame, California

One Cool Thing About Getting To Work Early

Time to sketch in the morning.

San Francisco sketches

Nice weekend in the city. And there is an amazing view of the bridge behind the Walt Disney Family Museum. Didn't actually make it inside though.