A long time ago, I was in Fargo, ND. It’s a great city with what appears to be a pretty good art scene and at least one pretty great gallery.

In that gallery, I saw an exhibition by a landscape artist who drew these fantastic landscapes. While they were extraordinarily well executed (and thus un-affordable to me), the really outstanding aspect was their scale.

They were really big – far larger than what you’d normally see for a drawing. Typically, people stop at about notebook size for drawings, regardless of how much time they’re in the industry. Every once in a while someone will go something like 12 x16in.

Ever since seeing this guy’s work, I’ve been thinking about it and lately I’ve been enticed at the prospect of doing some really large scale landscapes.

This drawing is the first I’ve done at 18 x24in recently – because really, most artists probably have spent some time at this size in school making hundreds of sketches. And then, when the intro classes are over they either give up drawing or focus on small scale stuff.

I don’t think I’ve achieved the proper scale I’m thinking of at 18x24in, but it’s like a test flight to shake down scaling up drawing.