 Hello and happy Earth Day! I have this drawing that I did in 1971 when I was a wee girl. Yes, this is one of my early artworks and I'm going to redraw it today in my modern style. Yes, I am weird enough to have a first grade drawing of mine framed in my house. And there's a number of reasons why this drawing means so much to me. One is that it's on that crappy manila paper and it just really reeks of childhood drawing. But two, this drawing tells me a lot about my skill as a kid and the fact that really I was built to be an artist because there are things in there that not all kids do. The biggest one to me is the fact that I saw the sky going from the top of the page or at least under the headline of my poster and it went all the way down to the tops of the buildings. Most kids do a strip of sky and even at this young tender age, I was busy doing that. There's also lots of crazy detail in there. There's all sorts of fun things going on in this. I don't even know what half of it is. Things are a little out of proportion and that kind of stuff but you know it is the joy of drawing as a kid that is just really fun. I won a ribbon for this. I believe it was a first place ribbon and it was really cool. I mean I was a graphic designer back then. I was putting type on my drawings. That was just wicked cool, right? Well, I decided to redraw it in my urban sketching style and I'm doing it in the book that I showed you last week when I talked about making my own custom sketchbook and this is on Kansan XL watercolor paper. It's a mixed media paper. It's not great for watercolor but it's going to work good enough for this and I'm using two different ones of my fountain pens. I am going to have a video soon on fountain pens in general and giving you more information on them but if you're like dying to find out which pen to send you recommend, this purple one is, I mean it comes in different colors but it's a twizby eco. I don't know if you even say twizby that way. There's not enough vowels in twizby. It's TWSBI and the pen type is called an eco and it's around the $30 range or thereabouts and it's a really nice pen. It writes well. There's just a lot of things I like about it for a nice mid-range pen. There are some cheap ones that I'll go through in the other video very soon and that's going to have a lot more about the different kinds of piston converters they have and that sort of thing. This twizby eco doesn't need one. That's one of the reasons that I recommend it because you just put the ink into the pen itself and not into cartridges and all that so it's kind of an easier pen to function with and the other pen that I rotate back and forth in between is my Visconti Mirage. Now that pen I would not recommend. I love it but it's like $149. I wanted to see whether or not a $149 pen was very much different from a $30 pen or a $10 pen and I discovered that it is. It's a very nice pen. It's got some very nice features to it and it's yellow which is like my favorite thing about it. I bought it before the pandemic when I was feeling like I could afford to buy expensive things and I'm glad I did back then because I do love it but it was a little challenging to sit here and look at myself thinking the things I could have done with the money that I spent on all these pens in that first part of the year. There you go right? We make these mistakes as we go. Anyway the drawing that I am working on was one that I decided to change the angle on because as someone who does perspective when I go out and do my urban sketches I just thought well I'm going to turn this whole thing as though I'm standing at a different angle and give it some overall perspective so I was sort of translating from what I saw in the buildings to try to make buildings that would look a little more realistic add proper windows and proper perspective on everything all that sort of stuff and then I was stuck with like trying to figure out what to put on the sidewalk because I couldn't see much of the crayon goobers that were on there. There's some parts that even look like there was something that got stuck on there. One of them looks like a dog shape but it's actually more like a door or a window but it's a tiny door and I wasn't really sure quite when it was but I decided to put some garbage cans and mailboxes and things and then on the left there's just very definite kind of forklift thing that I had drawn in there. I don't know I must have seen a forklift as a first grader and decided to put that in there. I don't know what the deal was but there you go and just added a whole bunch of different things to this. I had a couple little people walking down the street because there was a little person there. It looked like the person was jump roping but I don't think anybody would jump rope in a city like this necessarily so I did not include the jump rope but it also could have been headphones for all I know. The next part was to put some color in it because my original drawing of course was in color. It had all sorts of crayon color all over the place for my buildings and I discovered something as I was doing this which was that one of my two pens I believe it was the Twizbeco still had some non-waterproof ink in it and so it started doing some bleeding here and there which kind of helps with the grunge look and that's kind of fine. I decided I would just let it go and and not squeal about it and I just kept plowing forward but there were some places where I had a little little bloopage of the art because of that but I still think it worked out well anyway it is in my sketchbook it's not some big old finished thing so I didn't worry about it and it was a really fun process to go through though to try to take this drawing from my childhood and turn it into something really cool. Reimagining what I thought I might have seen in my mind as a child was just an interesting experiment to see if I could somehow figure out how that would have looked if it were a drawing that were in perspective. If you're looking for something to do as a little challenge to yourself as an artist that could be a really fun way to go just find a drawing that you did when you were a kid go through your stash of stuff I have a scrapbook full of drawings I might do this again sometime because it was really fun imagining a city that I saw in my head as a child so thank you very much for joining me the supplies the pens and stuff are in the doobly-doo as well as a link to that other video about the sketchbook on the screen and I will see you later have an awesome day an awesome earth day maybe go plant something or recycle something and I'll see you later bye