On Sundays I teach an Urban Sketching class at Crealde School of Art. We work outside on the campus to stay safe from the virus. Masks are required in the classroom but they are voluntary outside. I just insist that students put on their mask if they get within six feet of another student or myself.
This class was about doing a series of small sketches that explore the campus. The goal was to get 9, 4 or in my case 3 sketches on the page. I encouraged the students to thing in terms of a cinematic panorama.
As always I stressed the importance of using perspective to make it clear how each thing in the sketch is planted on the ground plane. Shadows under any object also help plant it in the scene.
I have a super talented student this semester and I am just encouraging her to keep the sketches in her sketchbook oriented in a similar way so that anyone who pucks up the sketchbook and flips through will not need to turn the sketchbook upside down or sideways to experience the next page or spread.
All week I work in the studio doing horrific images each day that document the pandemic and peoples ignorance, so it is nice to take one day a week to feel the sun on my face and simply put pastoral scenes on the page. Gustave Klimt put it perfectly, “Art is a line around your thoughts.”