Boardwalk Food part 1

When I was a little kid, if you asked me what the best things were about the boardwalk, I would likely have said in this order- rides, games, and food. I will eventually devote one of these Floating World prints to rides (meanwhile we've seen pieces of some in the first print of the series and my tower print from a few years ago), and games have been pretty well covered between that first print and the recent arcade print. But now it's time to do one dedicated to food. In my youth we usually went after dinner, so eating was mostly treats like ice cream. If something more substantial was desired, there were things like pizza slices, or sausage and pepper sandwiches. What else? Pretty much anything that you might find at a typical county or state fair anywhere in the country, plus all kinds of seafood, Italian foods and other regional favorites. If it tastes good and is bad for you, it's on the boardwalk.

Like the previous prints, I'd made notes and sketches of things that will go into this when I started planning the series a few years ago, and last month I started working up a full scale compositional sketch, seen in the top photo above. In order to put in as many different foods as possible, I will have a food stand counter in the foreground, a variety of typical places across the boards in the background, and some people in between (such as my cotton candy eater) holding/eating some of the other foods. My visit to Seaside last week got me a few more details. Today I took one of the prepared blocks, put in the border lines of the two panels, and started roughing in the basic structures. I think the basic proportions are ok, but I need to do a bit more work to bring the perspective into some kind of consistency. When I get that finished, I can start working on the details, put in the figures, etc.