The Malleable Monarch: Continuing the Catch-Up

I hope you all had a very happy 25th of December! We kept it casual at the house this year with just our sister staying over and watching some football while snacking after the ritual giving of gifts in the late morning. I bucked tradition and made carne asada and delicata squash tacos this year which I daresay turned out pretty tasty although the carne was a bit overcooked. C'est la vie! Since I'm home again this morning and have some more time on my hands, I thought I would play a bit more catch-up on posts and continue the pictorial tale of my very sketchy year.

For the Inktober series (see last post), I used primarily graphite and charcoal for all the images. For my lunchtime urban sketches, I'd also started out using primarily graphite pencils (the Blackwings are the best!) but lately I've been finishing more of them in ink. I've always enjoyed ink pen line drawing for landscape and structure work as it produces much cleaner lines. The drawback are that it's much harder to achieve good tonal gradation and they just take more time to complete. During my first lunchtime sketch sessions I just wanted to do something quickly and be (mostly) done in the limited time that I had so scribbling something out with a pencil that I wouldn't even bother to re-sharpen was working fine and is still good practice. However, as I discovered some particular places that provided a better overall scene or composition, the rough and quick nature of a pencil sketch just doesn't seem to do them justice. For those, I've been doing a quick framework pencil sketch and then taking a picture to help me finish them out in ink at a later date. I've thought about integrating some watercolor at some point but I'm not quite ready for that yet.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these pen & ink pieces and that you all have a much happier, less insane 2026.

This was a made-up scene to just practice a bit of perspective drawing.

Vancouver Substation. A friend of ours found the history
on this place and it's pretty cool. You can see an image of it
being moved into place here (link)

From the new Vancouver waterfront. A barge is docked at the LaFarge
terminal with the Union Pacific RR bridge in the background.

The image on the right is the downtown Vancouver Post Office
built around 1917 in a Neo-Classical style. The image on the
left is not in ink and was just a quick doodle of some Australian
magpies. I was too lazy to crop this.