Winter Park Art Festival

I went down to the Winter Park Art Festival to sketch. Tom Burton from the Orlando Sentinel wanted to meet me there to get some final video footage of me as I was out sketching. The festival itself was shutting down for the night and everyone was making a mad dash for either the free concert in the park or the local restaurants. I decided to sit down across the street from Bosphorus, a Turkish Restaurant. Tom simply hovered around shooting me and the scene I was sketching from every conceivable angle. It was a little distracting when he shoved the camera between my head and the sketchbook, I actually had to crane my head to the side to see what I was doing. It was convenient that the street was shut down since Tom would at times sit down in the street for low angle shots. It was fun having someone there to share the experience with. For instance he noticed that the lady holding the umbrella was there for a very long time. We both conjectured that she might have been trying to keep it from blowing away. It was interesting how often he focused on close ups of my nervous lines being thrown down on the page. The sketch was fun, I was afraid that I might tighten up with all the attention but the opposite was true. I loosened up and flowed with the experience. The jazz music in the park also gave me a beat to set the pace of the sketch to. When Tom was shooting on the opposite side of the street I started to notice myself bobbing my head to the beat and I thought, “maybe I should look a bit more serious, I am an artist after all….what the heck, go with it!”