My First Ever Sketch

Well, that title is definitely a lie.  I know that I've done lots of sketches before, but this is the first one I've done that hasn't been for a school assignment.  Actually, that is stretching the truth a little bit too.  I remember my parents giving me some pencils and a sketch book when I was younger, but I was just really bad at it.  My mum seemed to have some sort of artistic skill and I can still see the picture that she helped me draw as vividly as the day I (read: she) drew.

It was a fairly simple scene of a man climbing up the side of a mountain.  I'm pretty sure the drawing doesn't exist anymore, so no-one can check to see if I'm telling the truth when I say that the cliff-face was made of rocks the dusty red of the Australian outback, and the pinkish hues of the man climbing them seemed incongruous with the amount of time he spent outside.  His pack was strapped high on his back so as not to get in the way of the rope he clung to as desperately as a frightened refugee hangs to the side of their rickety boat being bashed by the relentless torment of the sea.

Let's be honest here.  The description I just wrote is much, much, MUCH better than the original artwork (and I'm well aware that my prose isn't exactly to a high literary standard).

I'm pretty sure that I drew the mountain-climber around the age of 7 or 8 and that has pretty much been the level of any of my attempts at artwork ever since.  But a month or so ago, Katy told me about the Sketch Book Project which intrigued my long-dormant artistic desires, especially considering one of the sketch book themes is "Waterslides I never rode".  And if you've ever been within shouting distance of me in Summer, you'll know that I LOVE waterslides.

But it took a while for the sketch book to arrive, so at the behest of my local barber Michael, I went straight to the newsagents and got myself a humble HB pencil and the cheapest pad of paper I could find and today, I completed my first real sketch.  Which brings us back to the title of this post.

During my lunch break I decided to wander round the city and look up.  It's an often-quoted but seldom-practiced saying that you miss so much by not looking up (which is why the kids in the Tomorrow When The War Began series so successfully hid from the invaders in the trees) and I realised that there are some really cool buildings in Sydney.  I decided to walk into one and it ended up being the Westpac Bank at Martin Place.  Which is where I found my inspiration for this:

The first two things I've noticed on looking at it again are that I'm pretentious enough to have signed it (which I realised as I was doing it), but I'm stupid enough to have written the date wrong at the top.

What do you think?