CHICAGO! - Art Trip - Ride Home

I was ready to head home after Saturday (July 10th). It was great to be someplace exciting, and to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but I missed having someone to share it, and I was starting to talk to myself. (Even in Chicago or New York people will look at you on the sidewalk if you start talking to no one and you don't have a Blue Tooth in your ear.)

The trip back was all about airports and plane rides. O'Hare is a busy place (for years it switched back and forth with Hartsfield-Jackson, in Atlanta, for busiest airport in the world - Atlanta is the top). Sketching people there was fun, and even easier than it had been on the way out, largely because I was warmed up and over my inhibitions.

This young man (on the right hand page) had a pink and brown plaid hat, red (crimson) short cropped hair, and was wearing capris and Argyle socks. His t-shirt had a stylized mobius strip on it that said, "Eat, read, sleep, eat, read, sleep, eat, read..." Chicago streets were a riot of tattoos, piercings, creative hair styles, and personal dress styles, on people of all genders. It was fun.

Planes, like people, don't stay still long, especially when they are no longer at the gate. So this one didn't give me enough time to give it side windows (poor passengers). What was fun about this view, and the challenge of this sketch, was to get the shape of the foreshortened plane. I love their shapes. After it left, I focused on the tails of all the United jets at the opposite concourse, and the truck with the hose on the back. I particularly like this one. It's a larger format, too, in a sketch pad.

I graduated from just drawing the seat in front of me to trying to capture the cabin around me. That was fun. Most of my fellow passengers fell asleep. I probably should have done this in the large moleskine, but this is the small one (4x6 inches both pages together).

In Detroit I nearly missed my plane, because I didn't realize we were no longer on Central Time. That surprised me. I was about to take and hour and do a watercolor of the bright red tram that runs back and forth inside the long concourse in Detroit (an almost totally white interior, except for that red red train), when I noticed a local clock and realized it was only 10 minutes till my plane boarded.

On the flight from Detroit to Raleigh we flew over one of the Great Lakes, and I saw had some awe inspiring views of clouds and shorelines. I was surprised and delighted. I tried to capture an impression of the shore, island, and clouds in this sketch. There was a small city on the shore.

And that's all from the Chicago trip. The coolest thing is that I've continued to draw and sketch. But that's for other posts. I'm almost two weeks behind on those...