American Tobacco Campus - Durham - Sketching

Sketching at night can be challenging. I did an outline drawing of this scene, on white paper. The problem was that most of the image should be nearly BLACK, and I would never get it smooth enough to be night sky. I sighed and was walking to my car when I thought, “Wait! There’s a “Negative” feature on my old Optio camera software!” So I drove home to my studio and created from memory a negative pencil image (what’s darkest will become white, and leaving white paper for the darkest darks - that’s the image below) and then photographed it and flipped it (Negative - that’s the image at the top of this post). I went “Sepia” while I was at it, because that better fit all the red brick at American Tobacco Campus. The image above was how it felt to me, including the glare in the lower left from all the spots pointing up at the architecture in the NC humidity.