Virtual Paint-Out: Packard Factory Detroit Michigan

I haven't submitted a sketch painting to Bill Guffey's Virtual Paintout for a full three years,...let alone done any drawings to write about in that time. Nonetheless, I have remained a fan of VPO (and other sketch sites), and have continually mused about doing some more drawing/painting again. (I don't know about you, but these drawing/paintings take a lot of time.  They don't come easily to me.)

Having grown up in the Rust Belt (northeastern Ohio), this month's choice of Detroit coincided nicely with my renewed interest in sketching/painting.  So...once again, I logged in and began to wander the streets.
I had remembered reading about the Packard factory on David Byrne's personal online journal (He has an excellent section with his impressions and thoughts about Detroit) and was surprised to discover that I could get up close enough to it on StreetView to get the kind of composition I was looking for.
It's a huge automotive plant-built in 1903-that was abandoned in the 1950's after the once fabled Packard luxury automobile lost its appeal through mis-guided mergers, economic conditions, and regrettable design and business decisions.  To me, it is the quintessential poster child for the decline of the northern industrial cities of America.

So...greetings to all of my fellow participants.  It's good to be back.
Google Maps reference location here

EDM #100-Draw a Landscape (Canary Islands-VPO)

Well...missed the end of the month deadline for the VPO again. It isn't like I had started this and didn't finish, I just needed the weekend to work on it and the monthly cut-off fell on Friday. Anyway, since I spent a lot of time during the month wandering for a location, then thinking/planning about it, I wanted to 'do something' after all that; so I didn't let the momentum die but rather come to fruition irrespective of an arbitrary deadline...not to say I won't be trying to bring it in under the wire in the future!
Luckily, I can very easily catalog this piece as EDM Challenge #100: Draw a Landscape. (EDM is the first online challenge group that drew me out of a lifetime of not drawing/painting: thanks to everyone in EDM).

Google Map Street View reference here.

Virtual Paintout: Stavanger, Norway

This is a Stavanger, Norway sketch painting that didn't make the time cut-off for the Virtual Paintout. I still wanted to do it since the shapes and colors were so interesting, not to mention the towering perspective from the street. Reference here.
This is the first painting I've done using only watercolor tube paints instead of watercolor markers and pencils. I see the wisdom of mixing paint on a palette. The next evolution will be to use different brushes beyond the Niji waterbrush.

Crosswalk-Abbey Rd. London

Another sketched painting for The Virtual Paintout: London. In this view, the white building behind the trees on the left is 3 Abbey Road NW8-home of Apple Records and Abbey Rd. Studio: drawn in the fortieth year after that famous crossing. (BBC video story of the crosswalk today.)
Reference link here.

Barcelona: Scenic Vintage Monorail Ride...and a Miracle

This is a painted, 'street view' sketch of a vintage monorail ride at a turn-of-the-20th century amusement park on top of Tibidabo Mountain overlooking Barcelona, Spain. I did this drawing as a submission to an on-going project called The Virtual Paintout: a monthly artistic challenge in which participants are given a city to explore and paint using the incredibly cool street view feature of Google Maps.
After much searching and wandering, I honed in on this amusement park with its atypical structures and interesting views. With an artist's eye I circled, looking high and low and back and forth, for a suitable angle from which to base my composition. Little did I know that-through these actions-I was to be the recipient of a random glimpse of auspicious coincidence, revealed to me in the most capricious manner: a million to one chance discovery of a bonafide Christian 'miracle', more obvious than twelve pizza Jesuses, IMHO and with all due respect.

Click on my drawing and you will 'see' what I am referring to:
the figure of Christ descending from the heavens!

Grant you, I have drawn this figure in the sky myself; but those that know me will tell you that I am not prone to chicanery or religious make-believe. When I do a drawing from a photograph, I usually go to great lengths to portray the scene with a modicum of accuracy-at least as much as my skill level will allow.
So...here is the Google Maps image in which this 'miracle' has manifested itself and upon which my rendering is based:

If you would like to see this in Google Maps for yourself, the address is 48 Cami de Vallvidrera al Tibidabo, Barcelona, Espana. In the boundless realm of possibility, there is this one street, one spot, and one direction where this phenomenon exhibits itself and even though I suspect that any miracle begins and ends on this side of the boundless veil...what can I say: I was impressed.
Long live serendipity.