A cold windy day at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. But when you have to make due with a crappy situation, you find inspiration (and warmth!) where you can. In the case of a couple weeks back, Barnes and Noble gave the necessary warmth and coffee fix our splinter sketch group needed early in the day.
The result was a brief glimpse at mundane life. I’m finding that book shelves and areas with a lot of them can make for some really effective background devices. They’re not particularly hard to capture the feel of in a short amount of time either.
Not wanting to fight the cold, a couple of us headed up into the Baltimore World Trade to the observation deck. It’s useful to find a new way to see an area, especially one as well traveled as the Inner Harbor. This was our fourth or so trip to the area in a different context, and it was beginning to feel a little stale. Getting up above it all helped me to find things I wanted to represent and the warmth to see it through.
The submarine and the last image came from our time up on the observation deck. If anyone hasn’t seen it yet, there are a lot of artifacts/ruined pieces from the attacks on 9/11. These have particularly profound impact on me each time I pass them as they represent a large chunk of my adult life that has been directly affected by that single day. I found the wall you see in the image above on the observation deck amongst a few more pieces of broken stone and metal on display. It shows a collection of portraits of people killed in the attacks that called Maryland home.