Florence, Venice and Paris - sketches and doodles

After my 4.5 months studying abroad in Ireland, my brother Dustin and I spent two weeks traveling in other countries around Europe. Dustin did basically all of the booking and scheduling (thanks again Dustin), and while it was still somewhat stressful at times, overall it was completely worth it and amazing. I didn't do a whole lot of drawing while there, but I did some, and most of those are posted here.




on the page with little faces: the building on the top of the left page was across the square in front of the Duomo, at night, during a crowded festival/concert thing going on. some of the gestural sketches on the right page are from people dancing on the stage at that concert. the little faces were just from my mind, based on a vague impression of people in Florence I had seen that night.


this was near the train station where we first entered Venice.


Paris blind contour sketches - I was sitting in a restaurant and all of these people were in cars or on motorcycles, stopping when the light was red at the intersection outside the window. I was pleasantly surprised at how I captured some of their faces (I'm still fairly new to doing blind contour drawings of faces).

Animation work

Over the past 5 months, I was studying abroad in Ireland (through my school, MCAD). One of the courses I had was "Independent Project", which involved weekly group meetings with the MCAD teacher who was also there for the semester (Pam Valfer) and the other MCAD students there, and then individual meetings with Pam. The project itself required a proposal written before we even got to Ireland, but once there, we were free to go in any direction we wanted to. I ended up doing a series of experimental animations, using charcoal and collage, that each involved some reaction I was having to the Burren (the name of the region of Ireland I was in). Finding a way to set up for each of these was a bit of a challenge, as the facilities at the Burren College of Art aren't quite what I'm used to at MCAD... Ok, I'm talking enough, here are the animations I made ("Foggy Night" - actually made for another class (Mixed Media) but it relates to the other three in some ways, "Tomb", "Wall", and "Burren and Home" - and that's the order I made them in):

Foggy Night from Dylan Davis on Vimeo.

Tomb from Dylan Davis on Vimeo.

Wall from Dylan Davis on Vimeo.

Burren and Home from Dylan Davis on Vimeo.

"Foggy Night" and "Tomb" were both made on the wall of an empty classroom with only the regular ceiling lights of the room for lighting (which is why they flicker a lot - I'm not entirely okay with the effect but I don't hate it either). "Foggy Night" was made for my Mixed Media class, for an assignment that simply had the prompt "Journey", and was based on a walk home from the school I made one foggy night, by myself.

The subject of "Tomb" is Poulnabrone, a "portal tomb" monument in the Burren, built thousands of years ago and with the purposes still uncertain. "Wall" came from me experimenting with cut-out, wrinkled/painted pieces of tracing paper, and from my interest in the many stone walls in the Burren. "Burren and Home" combines imagery from my dreams, the landscape of the area I grew up in, my fear of tornados and floods, and ruins of man-made structures in the Burren.