Blind Contour Sketches of Florence

Okay, so my brother and I traveled for two weeks after finishing our semester abroad at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland.

I did in fact have my sketchbook with me, but I didn't do a ton of sketching. What I did do, I am currently putting all on one page (one page per section of the trip). This is the page for Florence, Italy (the place that we spent the most time, about four days, with a wonderful host and friend).

Most of those doodles are blind-contour drawings. I tried picking a colored-pencil to convey the mood of the place that I was when I decided to do the drawings. The phrase, "A guy kicked it" is referring to somebody kicking that glass bottle that I was drawing (it was the night before Labor Day, and there was MASSIVE celebration on the streets, so crowded that you had to push and shove your way through to get anywhere; and so glass bottles left on the ground would just get kicked around, sometimes breaking into pieces).

More to come soon of the other places, which yielded less sketches (perhaps because I felt more rushed in the other places, having only a day or two in Venice, Weimar, and Paris, as opposed to four in Florence. We visited London and Brighton at the start and end of our trips, but I felt too focused on scheduling and meeting friends at the start of the trip, and at the end, too tired :P ).

PS. Here is a link to the Flickr set (see bottom of paragraph), of more than 1300 photos, taken by both of us (see tags for who took which photo), from those two weeks traveling afterward. It includes photos of the 'sights/sites' that you're supposed to go see, plus a handful of more random, sometimes more blurry, shots of just walking around. Also a ton of photos of book covers and some shots inside books, as we spent a lot of time in bookstores, especially in the children's illustrated book sections. (We took home maybe a dozen books, mostly smaller. One of my favorite illustrators as a kid, Sven Nordquist, had a newer book that was pretty large in terms of length and width, but we decided we had to squeeze that one home, and so did. He was famous for the Festus and Mercury books, or known in their native place as Findus and Pettson. Here is a link to the book we got, which was not related to Findus and Pettson, but still extremely awesome in its level of detail and color on each page: http://www.amazon.com/ist-meine-Schwester-Sven-Nordqvist/dp/3789169404/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_9 )

And here's the link to the Flickr set I spake of above:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/15978133@N00/sets/72157626583212207/