Art Lesson #43: Drawing Dolores Park

A lesson in not knowing when to stop

I drew this on an unusually balmy day in February in San Francisco. It was a very ambitious drawing. This is a massive panorama of the city. There’s no specific focal point, just a jumble of MANY THINGS.

Honestly, I’m not thrilled with it. Mistakes were made. But perhaps you can learn from my mistakes!

As I watch the video now, I realize that I should’ve left it as a pencil drawing and not bothered with watercolor and marker. It was cool and interesting at that earlier stage.

Sometimes it’s hard to know when to stop. This is one of those times. But that’s okay. Sketchbooks are meant to be places where you experiment, and that’s definitely what this was.

The main takeaways that you might find useful, though, are the landmarks I chose to frame the drawing, and the fact that apart from those very prominent buildings, I mostly didn’t try to copy every single building. I just used elements from the buildings I saw to fill in the gaps between the landmark buildings.

I also put some trees in fir…