We recently came back from a vacation trip to NYC. When walking in the city, it was like flipping my architecture study books--I was turning each page by visiting the buildings and places that I had once studied them. At first, I thought to only put my sketches out to share my experience, but later, I found that it is not enough. I love exploring every corner of the new places when I am visiting. A city like New York is not one place, and its enormous size makes it hard to explore it in a week. So first, I made a list of places we wanted to visit. Using Google Map, we pinpointed all locations on the map and tried to group them based on the proximity of points. For each day, we planned a start point and an endpoint. We checked places in between as we walked toward the endpoint. Adding these places as a point and putting them in a very simple map helped us a lot to cover all the things we have in our mind for this trip. But what cannot be explained here is walking, walking, and a lot of walking....
Our daily routine on this trip includes a lot of walks. Taking the bus, subway, ferry and once a tram ride as well as stopping and seating to take some breath provides me a lot of short stillness moment to observe very carefully and pick my nooks to sketch. Only in a fast pace trip you will appreciate those moments of seating still and looking around. I felt my eyes seeing more details, my ears hearing more sounds, and even the nostalgic sound of the subway train was heard as a rhythmic song.
I love sketching where I go, especially places with different characteristics and sense of place. It seems the hustle and bustle of NYC stole the colors from my sketch. In contrast to my other sketches, in which the peace and quiet of nature encourage you to utilize watercolor and other drawing media. My sketch on this trip was a fast, bold, and clear line works.
