Often when traveling with a small group, we don’t have an hour or more to do a drawing. So if we want to capture a scene, we have to be able to draw quickly. My strategy is to first establish the structure of the overall composition and then, depending on the amount of time available, add whatever details I can to try to capture the spirit of a place. While drawing these very quick 10- to 20-minute sketches in Rio de Janeiro, I was accompanied by my friend and fellow urban sketcher Norberto Dorantes of Buenos Aires, who is a master of flowing lines.

Many thanks to Glaucia Augusto Fonseca for being such a gracious and generous host during our short visit to Rio de Janeiro. The setting for the city is truly stunning.

I flew to NYC for a presentation Monday evening by Ian Shapiro, co-author of Green Building Illustrated, which was recently published by Wiley. Sponsored by the Urban Green Council, the New York chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, the author talk was held in the beautiful Trespa Design Centre in SOHO.

Driving across the Manhattan Bridge from JFK with Ian that Monday morning, I confronted this distant view of the new WTC. Fortunately, I had some time to go back and capture that urban scene at the corner of Bowery and Canal Street.

After meetings at Wiley the following day, I had some free time to walk around the WTC site, where I found this view of the WTC from the grounds of St. Paul’s Chapel.

Here are two sketches done during our recent trip south to St. Augustine, Florida. The first is of Flagler College, formerly the Hotel Ponce de Leon, which was designed by John Carrere and Thomas Hastings and built by Henry Flagler in the late 1880s. The original hotel was the first in Florida to be supplied with electricity and contains beautiful Tiffany windows. The view was drawn from the front arcaded walkway that helps define the entrance courtyard.

This is the Plaza de Constitucion in St. Augustine, Florida, which was established by Spanish Royal Ordinances in 1573. After I began with the contours of the tree in the foreground, the drawing seemed to take on a life of its own, moving left toward the gazebo, and then to the right and ending with the 18th-century Cathedral Basilica in the background. It ended up as a two-dimensional graphic that relies more on overlap than linear perspective for depth.

After the workshops at the Savannah College of Art and Design, we drove south to Cumberland Island, Georgia’s largest barrier island, accessible only by ferry and now a designated National Seashore overseen by the National Park Service. At the southern tip of the island are the Dungeness Ruins, the remains of a mansion built by Thomas Carnegie, brother of Andrew Carnegie, and his wife Lucy in the 1880s as a winter retreat. This panoramic view of the site shows the open grounds, which looks southward over a vast saltwater marsh.

While waiting for the ferry that would take us back to the mainland, I popped into the Ice House Museum and was excited to see a photograph of the mansion as it was before it burned in 1959. I quickly drew this view to show a little of its character in its heyday.

It’s really cold here in Seattle and until it warms up enough to go out and draw, I will continue to post a few images from Rome. Although It feels good to be home, my mind still wanders occasionally back to Rome.

Just off of Via del Pelligrino as it leads away from the Campo dei Fiori is a dark archway, the Arco degli Acetari, which opens onto this quiet courtyard. It is perhaps one of the more photographed places in Rome; you see it on postcards as well as on numerous Flickr sites. I’ve passed by it many times and decided one morning to stop and try to capture the medieval quality of the space. This line drawing cannot do justice to the picturesque, colorful courtyard with its greenery, stairs leading off in different directions, shuttered windows, and tiled roofscapes.

I leave Rome tomorrow for Seattle. While it has truly been a privilege and a pleasure to have once again taught in the Eternal City, I’m looking forward to returning home. Before departing, I want to share just a few more drawings.

If I absolutely had to pick a favorite building in Rome, it would have to be the Pantheon, which is ideal in its conception and outlook but also attractive in the way it has aged and adapted over the centuries. I’ve drawn the Pantheon many times before but this time I decided to capture an aspect of the structure that rarely gets noticed.

These are two interior views of the Pantheon. The first was done quickly in 2000, while the second took about an hour to do on a recent cold and rainy day, when the idea of sitting inside and drawing felt strangely welcoming. It’s always difficult to convey the way the spatial volume envelops you but the challenge was worthwhile and rewarding.