My Summer Location Drawing Class at AAU, San Francisco (Part 2: Yerba Buena Gardens)

Class meets twice a week for six hours a session, and at a different location each day. For our second session, we practiced our meeting up skills in this beautiful downtown park with only minimal wrangling. Having warmed up with a couple of passenger portraits on the BART train, I settled atop a high concrete planter to draw my assistant, Jonathan, here seated by some papyrus rushes and drawing a local tai chi group. This time it was a park official who asked me to move, but, fortunately, I was about done with that part of the drawing and so moved on to add the side of the Metreon building. Many people come to relax on the grassy steps on the Mission Street side of the park, facing St. Patrick's Church and the Marriott Hotel. I've drawn these two buildings from a similar vantage before, but this time I combined both sides of the street into one composition. Pencil, ink, colored pencil, watercolor, and digital. Next up: the Ferry Building

my summer location drawing class at AAU (part 1: powell street)

This summer term I am excited to be teaching a class on Location Drawing for Academy of Art University. My students and I will be sketching and painting at points of interest all over town and even in the East Bay. Everyone starts with a brand new sketchbook and will fill at least 100 pages with observational drawings and sketch reporting by the time the class finishes in seven and a half weeks. I will be posting mine here. For our first day, we drew up and down Powell Street and in Union Square. The top drawing here is the view from in front of the Westin St. Francis Hotel where they fly a different international flag each day and where they apparently don't like people to sit on the sidewalk and sketch. I was asked twice to move, once by a police officer who was quite nice and understanding and told me that there is a law against sitting on the sidewalk, but said I would be ok as long as my bag was not in the way of traffic. The hotel guy who talked to me later was not as nice about it. More soon!

sketchcrawl 42

Haight and Ashbury, SF