Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Riding and sketching

August 9, 2022

My goal today was to ride at least 80 miles and see my odometer turn over to 15,000 miles.  To accomplish that I decided to ride to Fromberg, about 40 miles away and do some sketching.  I’ve been there before and sketched up an old abandoned garage in May of 2021:


The ride there was great.  It was getting warm but the light traffic made it relaxing.  I cruised the downtown main street, the whole block of it, several times looking for an interesting view and some shade to sit it.  I decided to park in from of a blacksmith’s shop, near their town hall and sketch the north side of the street.  I set up my stool, got out my drawing tools and go after it.

I think I was there for a little over an hour.  Time really does fly when doing this type of sketching.  I started with a layout of shapes in graphite and then switched to pen and added the details.  I am using my sketchbook in a 2-page wide angle configuration and plan to get maybe 5 building is this drawing.  I needed to get up and move around, plus I was losing the shade, so I decided to call it quits and come back and continue in the same spot another day.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:


I’ll be adding watercolor to it later.

While sitting there a couple tourists rode by on a Honda ST-1100.  It was the first bike I’d heard in a while, other than mine, that wasn’t a V-Twin.  Here’s my bike on the street there:



I took my usual return trip back to Billings, Hwy 212 to Theil Road (River Road), to Duck Creek, to Story Road, and then up Shilo through the roundabouts.  When I got to King Ave. my odometer said to pull over for a photo:


Yep, I’ve ridden 15,000 miles since I got the bike in April 2021.  That’s over 1,000 miles per month which, of course, is probably higher than that since I really didn’t get out much during our winter.

I got home and had logged 84.7 miles for the day.



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