I happened to be in Salt Lake City for a conference and found myself surrounded by streaming crowds of Mormons who were also there for "Conference." The Temple area is beautiful.
I did this sketch just inside the gate to the garden, just south of the Temple. There are several graceful old plane trees there, and the sight of the sunlit building through their branches is what made me stop and spend an hour.
In other settings I would have people of all ages and backgrounds looking over my shoulder and commenting, but here only children struck up conversations with me. Parents sometimes joined in after their children started it, but even then, the parents did not encourage the conversations, or add anything to them. It gave me a polite taste of what it feels like to be an outsider - something I'm not used to.
Click for much larger image. This is 9 x 12, done in pencil, then inked with prismacolor pens (which don't run when wet) and other pens (which do run when wet) and watercolor crayons. Water was added with a Niji water brush. Then the pencil was all erased. The Temple has windows all the way to the ground, but I felt the incomplete lower section of the sketch made the building seem taller - which it certainly is.
My last full day in Salt Lake City I went back up the hill toward the capitol to draw two lovely old houses on State Street. Brown Prismacolor pen. No pencil first - just sat on the grass across the street and jumped in with the pen. Mistakes must be "faked" into the drawing, since there is no erasing. Like a musical performance, where errors are best handled by acting like they're how it was supposed to be played... On the way back down I picked up a yellow cottonwood leaf, from a huge old specimen, and put in the journal to press.
Then the next day, on my way home, I drew this prior to boarding. It was cloudy with frequent showers, so there were no strong shadows. I looked at this after I got home and realized that without something on the ground beneath this plane (like a shadow), it looks like it's floating there. Jet as toy balloon. Wausach Mountains in the background. The peaks all around the Salt Lake basin are like shark teeth, and subtly colored in ways that change with the sunlight and shadows. I like them a lot.
