45th World Wide Sketchcrawl : A Weekend in Ithaca, NY

A couple days ago, urban sketchers from Toronto, Kitchener, Montreal and New York got together for a weekend-long sketchcrawl in Ithaca, NY. The goal was to capture the beautiful scenery around the many falls and on the Cornell University campus.

On saturday morning, we managed to squeeze a couple outdoor sketches despite the rain on the first day. The scenery was breathtaking. A couple of us even sketched on the suspension bridge. It was an interesting experience as you can feel the bridge moving as people walks or job on the bridge. We then joined the rest of the sketchers, including some locals who found out about our little road trip and sketched with us for the day. 

The weather was a little less cooperative in the afternoon. But I still got to sketch the statue of Andrew Dickson White, co-founder of Cornell University, located in front of the Goldwin Smith Hall. I had a "Truman Show moment" as I was contemplating sketching the surroundings of the statue : Just as I was thinking about whether I should continue or find an location indoors, a bell rang, the wind picked up and it started raining, like a carefully orchestrated scene. Weird. So we headed inside the building to continue our sketching session.  There were a couple interesting statues inside the building, named after a British historian and journalist who lived in Toronto.

On Sunday, the weather forecast was predicting freezing temperatures, so we changed our plans to sketch outdoors and opted for indoor locations. In the morning we went to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, which had a lot of interesting features, including a beautiful zen garden visible from inside the museum where I spent most of my time there sketching after taking a look at some of the artwork on one of the floors. We then moved on to the Museum of Earth in the afternoon, to sketch all kinds of interesting skeletons. Mine didn't quite fit the page properly, but next time I might use Marc Holmes' method of spreading the sketch over multiple pages got hid sketch of the whale's bones. 

I had a great time sketching. It was great meeting like minded people, making new friends in a new location and learning from each other during this trip. It's fascinating the amount of insight you get just from looking at what others are doing when it comes to sketching. We had such a good time that we're planning to do this again next year, probably a little earlier so that the temperature's a little more convenient for outdoor sketching.  ...