While in Griffith park yesterday evening I looked West when near the top of a rise and saw one of the great sights you can get at this time of year. The stretch of the Santa Monica mountain range coming in from the West shrouded in the mists rolling in from the West. The mist hides a lot of detail and leaves you with just simple layers of shade, almost monochromatic. It was quite beautiful. (Sadly, a lot of people who like to reach for the usual negative cliches about the city assume the mist is smog, but it is not.) Anyway, I had my notebook with me, and some watercolour pencils and a brush, and my instinct was to just do a series of washes to capture the scene, but in the end I went for just plain pen and some quick cross-hatching to try to evoke the scene, in a double page spread. The Hollywood sign, on Mount Lee, is sort of visible in the distance, and I’m standing on Mount Hollywood (yes, *not* the mountain with the Hollywood sign, as is often assumed) which rises above the Observatory. I tilted the image to right the communications tower back to the vertical a bit.
Fun.
-cvj
