A fun side effect of my two New Jersey sketching sojourns is that my pen and ink work is now immortalized in the album liner notes of a folk band called Midland Uprising. If you purchase their new album Awake For Days, you will be forced to look at my hastily-formed drawing whilst learning new things about each of their catchy tracks.

It took me a while to figure this out, but the splashes of color on the front cover are actually from my earlier sketch of musician Brian Yost as he performed with his other band Leaf Pile in Jersey City.

Binge-watching HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and sketching my impression of Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks.

I’m getting the hang of using watercolor to spice up ink drawings, so today I thought I’d challenge myself by rendering a small river scene solely in paint.

My friend complimented me on this sketch of the Arch in Washington Square Park yesterday. I shrugged and said, “it’s just a sketch.” But then I realized that I’ve probably drawn the thing about a dozen times, and each time I’ve captured it a little bit better. A dozen sketches from now, I’ll be embarrassed about this one. Progress is always good.

Bonus park denizen.

Aside from practice, which I don’t do often enough, credit is due to Marc Taro Holmes’ awesome book, The Urban Sketcher, as well as his video course on Craftsy. (Note: I do not make any money off these links, mostly because I have no idea how to set that up.) He gives you some great techniques for keeping your sketches loose and impressionistic. I feel that applying them has made my lines less hesitant, people more alive, and structures and scenery less bogged down in needless detail. One of my favorite ideas from him is outlining shadow shapes as you sketch, and filling them in later (you can see a bit of this on the Arch). I don’t know why it works, but it does.

Here’s a quiz, did I use real ink and digital watercolor, or real watercolor and digital ink?