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December 20, 2005

Bluegrass Sketch at the Station Inn

After some kindly goading by Mr. Porkpop, I've taken a few minutes to scan in a sketch from a few months back, taken while visiting my pal and fellow blogger Michael Ashby who lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

The drawing below was done in the dim light of the Station Inn, a famous place for Bluegrass artists, something like The Grand Ole Opry for Country music:

(click to see a larger image)

Because the sketch done in low light conditions, it seemed a good time to use a speed sketch technique to capture the mood, rather than the visual appearance. The line quality is not exact, rather I let my hand loose to only follow my ears, eyes and heart to try and capture the moment.

It was a fun exercise, and I think the results turned out pretty well. And yes, it was excellent Bluegrass music, played by a band called The String Dusters. Check out the 3 free MP3s on their site. Yeee-Haw! :-)

Technorati Tags: bluegrass, mikerohde, moleskine, nashville, music, sketches

December 20, 2005 11:57 PM | Sketches | add to del.icio.us

Comments

Very nice sketch Mike, and I'm so pleased you got round to posting something :-) This is completely different to your other work -- it almost puts me in mind of sgraffitti, where a picture is revealed by scratching it out of a "wash" that covers the whole paper. It's almost like you've shaded the whole page in, and then erased some of the shading to create the picture.

I also think I'll head on over to their site and listen to their free MP3s.

Posted by: Neal dench at December 21, 2005 2:55 AM

Thanks Neal! I always love your friendly goading on sketch work – please do keep it up! I need someone out there challenging me to keep sketching. :-)

That's an interesting observation about the 'scratch away' technique. I used to do this back in college, which I think I have somewhere nearby actually.

It was called "scratchboard" and it was done using a scratch-point on prepared board that had a black surface "painted" on by the manufacturer.

http://www.thumbprintsart.com/page2.html

It was a little messy but very fun to scratch out an image rather than placing it down as I usually did with ink. Maybe I need to pick up some scratchboard at the art store!

I will check for those old sketches and scan 'em for the weblog if I can locate them. I bet they'd be something a little different.

Thanks again for the kind words!

Posted by: Mike Rohde at December 21, 2005 8:03 AM

Looks like Burt Reynolds playing the guitar.

Posted by: Phil at December 22, 2005 1:43 PM

Darn! I forgot to sketch his Trans Am in the background. :-)

Posted by: Mike Rohde at December 22, 2005 1:53 PM