Vignettes Big and Small

Nina and I got together for a quick little chat-and-sketch at McClellan Ranch in Cupertino a few weeks ago.

In a new place, with not much time, my go-to thing to do is to sketch little vignettes. They’re small in scale, and kinda fun to build from the inside out: I start with my main subject and once I have that down, I just build out, keeping the silhouette interesting.

In both these sketches, the foliage around the buildings is at least as important to the compositions as the structures themselves.

I used a mix of media in both of these: watercolor, pen and ink, crayon and gel pen. The mix lets me get a rich textural effect.

Not all the vignette-style sketches I make are small. Sometimes I’ll employ that same idea on a bigger sketch like this, letting it grow outward but not feeling a need to stretch it to all corners of the page. This is Alamitos Creek, a neighborhood creek with a trail by it.

Vignettes like this let me sketch just a little bit of a landscape and suggest the idea of it going on and on.