We recently took a trip down to the San Francisco Bay Area. Inspired by Dinotopia author James Gurney’s great location work, I decided to try something new for me….quick sketching people while sitting in the van for the 40 minutes that my husband was in a business meeting and also sometimes even quicker sketching as we traveled on Highway 101.

It was fun! And I found that it’s a great way to work on developing one’s visual memory.

Here are two of James Gurney’s posts that particularly caught my eye and got me thinking about trying it myself: “Tiny Landscapes” and “While waiting for lunch…”, which demonstrates that anything can be an interesting subject if you just look at it in a fresh way.

As you can see, I didn’t try to add any color to these first attempts. I kept it simple: a 7×5″ Pentalic Nature Sketch sketchbook, which I chose because the paper is heavy enough to take a watercolor wash and a .03 Micron Sakura pen. None of these took more than a couple of minutes, other than some of the landscapes in which I got the shapes drawn as fast as I could and then filled in foliage and did a little tweaking as we traveled on. The Confusion Hill sign sketch was done while we filled the car with gas. My self-assignment was to find something, anything, to draw within my field of vision.

As you can see, it wasn’t exactly a warm day by the Bay.