Art Lesson #26: Coffee & Sketching in North Beach

The Zoetrope building, sketched (kind of) live

Over the next few weeks I’m going to send you a few more of these live videos that I recorded while I was sketching in San Francisco. Apologies again for the awkward camerawork and uneven audio—I have since fixed both with new equipment, and you’ll see the results of that soon. I did my best to “fix it in post,” as we say in the glamorous world of video editing.

I drew this with colored pencil and splashes of watercolor from my vantage point at a coffee shop across the street. The trickiest part about this scene is that San Francisco is hilly, and I was uphill from the building, but then the street that runs right through the middle of this drawing (Kearney) seems to be fairly flat but then to go uphill, not downhill, off in the distance. If you’re trying to follow the rules of perspective, hills complicate things.

Also, I kept calling this the Zoetrope building because that’s what I’ve always called it, but in fact, it’s Columbus Tower or the Sentinel Building, depending on who you ask…