Tag Archives: Missouri

Airplane still life sketch by Chandler O'Leary

Killing time

If I’m traveling by car, you can put me in any landscape—even the most barren, treeless, flat places that most sane people would label “dull”—and I’ll be fascinated. No matter how long the trip and unvarying the scenery, there’s always something for me to sketch, some vista to marvel over.

Put me in an airplane over cloudy skys, and I’ll go out of my gourd with deadly boredom. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but on this day a couple of years ago, it was especially torturous. The flight time was doubled in length thanks to bad weather—and I had run out of things to draw, and pages in my sketchbook in which to draw them. And I can’t sleep on planes. So in desperation, I grabbed the in-flight magazine, and when the flight attendant asked me my drink preference, I picked the beverage with the most complex can design.

(I still finished with an hour left to go on the flight.)