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| ...and again in 90 minutes |
The morning of September 24th started out a little differently than most. Each student was scheduled to have a sketchbook review with one of the professors between 8:00am and 10:00am before leaving West Yellowstone in Montana to visit Old Faithful inside Yellowstone National Park. The sketchbook reviews were meant to help the students check up on their work and to discover ways they might better their drawings and writings.
Leaving for Old Faithful we were again greeted with beautiful weather and the sun was chasing away the morning chill. While driving through Yellowstone, vast amounts of steam could be seen rising into the bright blue sky from the numerous geysers dotting the landscape outside the windows of the vans. Other park visitors this morning were slowing traffic as they stopped along the road to view and photograph trumpeter swans, bison and elk.
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| Nick's Composite and Watercolor |
We arrived at Old Faithful and gathered outside the Old Faithful Inn for a brief lecture about the history of national parks in America. We were then assigned a project analyzing details of landscape design and architecture throughout the park. These included screening, use of native vegetation and materials, low silhouettes with a strong emphasis on the horizontal, elimination of straight lines and right angles in the landscape, blurring the line between indoor and outdoor, scaling materials to one another and to the place, using rustication as opposed to clean finished details, orienting stone as it’s found in nature, and eliminating lines of demarcation between nature and man-made structures. We then dispersed and searched for six examples of these details around the park. Our assignment was to create a two page spread in our sketchbooks with a map of a small area of the park in the center. We then sketched these six different details and laid them out around the map, indicating where in the park they are located. The finished result was composite drawing of parkitecture around Old Faithful that clearly expressed the details and showed where one could find them on the map.
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| We all scream for ice cream! |
After we completed the project we were given an hour to compose a sketch using a medium of our choice. Several students chose to do watercolor while others used pencil or pen. Our time at Old Faithful flew by and we quickly found ourselves laying down our projects at the site of our meeting earlier that day. I always find it interested to see so many unique approaches to the same project, and much of the work was quite impressive. After a long day of hard work some of us made a brief pit stop for ice cream before meeting back at the vans. We traveled back to the hotel and spent the evening exploring the town and buying sweet wildlife shirts, a fitting end to the day.
Nick Gulick and Jordan Garvey
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