Like I said the other day, point-of-view is everything. And while flying isn’t my favorite way to travel, I absolutely love it when the weather is clear enough that I can see the landscape below. I love being able to draw the scene below like a map, and—especially in places I know well—follow along with the changing scenery, like reading a living atlas.
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.)
People always ask me why on earth I’d rather take a road trip when I could “save time” and fly. And sure, sometimes flying is fun—especially when I’ve got a clear day and a window seat. But while I could go on about all the annoying things about flying that drive me nuts, or extoll the virtues of getting to know the geography between points A and B, or wax poetic about how for me it’s not actually about “saving time” at all, but about “journey” vs. “destination,” etc. etc. blah-blah-blah…
Yeah. All of that is true, but really I just need to show them this sketch:
This. This is why I’m no fan of flying. There’s only so many times I can draw the same airplane wing, or so much detail I can add to a beige plastic wall, before I completely lose my mind.
We don’t get a lot of snow in my part of Washington. So if I want to see winter weather, I usually have to do some traveling first. I always seem to feel this urge right around now, the first of the year. Maybe it’s just the white of the snow—or the hush of winter—but something about a crisp winter day feels like a blank slate.
Here’s to a fresh start—or if you’re like me, a blank page in a brand new sketchbook. Happy new year!