Sketches from New York

2 airports, 5 delays, 1 cancellation, hours on the subway, and a bus ride later

Hey! It's me Phi

This week I come by way of New York for a short hang with my brother and niece in Red Hook. I put the game dev on hold this week and chose to swap out the laptop with my sketchbook. It was hard to step away from it, but only focusing on sketching during the trip actually helped me enjoy the being up there. Usually, my mind would wander and constantly think about the project. What bugs I need to fix, what features I need to put in, what coding problem I needed to solve. But this time, it felt good to say… not now on the game to allow my brain to only focus on sketching (at least for this week)

I don't know about you but sometimes I can't fully enjoy a game and become fully immersed… especially 1st person games where I’m mainly just wandering and looking down at the floor, the textures and exploring every nook and cranny to analyze all the art. Substack user

Howler

mentioned something similar to this…

… where your fov is limited severely so in a lot of fps games you can cheese people with verticality because people naturally don’t look up in games.

I wonder if that has crossed over into the real world…

I believe this is true and I hadn’t noticed it in the real world until this trip. I’ve been to NYC several times in the past, but found myself looking up more often than not while walking and traveling around the city. I wonder why that was? Maybe it was because of the sketchbook. Maybe it was because my mind wasn’t wondering on other projects. Maybe I was just actually seeing more and taking in the city.

Whatever it was, I’ll take it. Walking around was a nice change from the concrete deserts of Texas. I wish I had more time to actually sit and draw, like Urban Sketchers or Plein Air painters do so deliberately.

I wanted to pause… and sit still… to sketch. But often times its not the case. We’re always on the go, or doing something else. So making time to bust out an easel, folding chair, paints, or sketchbook just because you see something interesting is hard to do. How do you guys do it?

I did snap a photo of course. But this time knowing I wanted to revisit it with a sketch made it feel different. It wasn’t just a photo, and move on. Knowing that I wanted to sketch it later actually allowed me to think more about the photo I just took. Thinking about the things that made that particular place, location, object… interesting in the first place.

The trip to NYC was good, but I can't say the same for the journey back home. Let’s just say I'm grateful for the time to be able to sketch… and happy to be back in Austin. I was also happy to have my reMarkable (for sketching and typing this Substack post) with me during the trip. I'd love to take a dedicated sketch trip back to NYC on my next return. So much to explore, look at and it seems the city is built for sketching.