We are enjoying the wide open vistas of southern Utah. The screeching flash flood warning that came through everyone’s phones this morning was a bit of a flashback to last January’s killer wave incident on our vacation to the beach. We seem to have developed a way of attracting historic weather conditions when we vacation. Just call me Chicken Little. But the resulting skies are so beautiful, it’s hard to complain about being asked to sit still for a day while the storms pass through. We’re safe in our hotel room on high ground.
So why, if you already have a lovely photo of a dramatic sky and were unable to sit and sketch that sky in real time because you were either rolling down the road, or it was too cold, or you didn’t have time, would you want to then want to go back and make a duplicate of that in your sketchbook? Oh, so many reasons! Let’s look at a few:
- To narrow the focus on what excited you about the view
- To eliminate things in the view that don’t excite you like cars, antennae, or other interlopers
- To fill time stuck in your hotel room during a winter storm
- To really cement the memory of what you have seen in a way that a photo cannot
- For practice with your materials so that when you are able to work in nature, you will know the materials well and be able to work faster
- As an adjunct to written notes you’ve made in your journal
- So that it will be in your journal and not lost in the thousands of photos on your phone
- Because you can
Let me give a shoutout to our new Entegra Expanse RecVan for the sweeping views from the cabin as we rolled down the road. Never have I been able to capture the true feeling of a landscape while moving down the road in a vehicle until now. Also props to iPhone cameras and the onboard photo editing software. Snap-Edit-Snap-Edit-Snap-Edit is all I did for 2,000 miles, except when I was knitting.