Supermarket Rubble part 5

Had some very busy days over the past week, so today I need to catch up on some things going back to the weekend.

On Saturday afternoon I went up to the Studio and started working on the sketch for the new supermarket block.  I liked the orientation of the last paper sketch, so I decided to reverse it so that the print would look the same.  I traced the back of the paper sketch to get the mirror version and copied from that, keeping everything about the same size.

One issue that I ran into was that the wood is a little larger than the sketchpad I had used, and using my standard supermarket print size, the resulting drawing did not quite fill the space.  Not liking the idea of just having an hunk of empty parking lot there, I decided it would be best to put in another vehicle.  However, I didn't want said vehicle to block the view of the pile of bricks and rubble or the loose carts.  The solution I came up with was to put in that space a pick up truck.  The tallest part, the cab, would fill most of the space in the lower left corner between the carts and the brick pile, while the less tall truck bed would slide under the bricks and loose carts to the right.  And I even had a perfect reference to use.

My father had enjoyed building scale models from plastic kits in his youth- when I was little some of these were still around in his old bedroom in the house he grew up in.  No surprise that he got me into the same hobby while I was still young.  He did most of the work in the earliest days, which may have been as much about him still enjoying the hobby, but eventually I took over the whole process.  About half cars, half planes, usually warplanes which were always a lot more interesting than civilian aircraft.  (we did make a DC-10, the kind of plane we took on a family trip to California when I was in first grade)  The last ones were probably somewhere in the high school years, when drawing became my main creative outlet.  I don't know how many were saved from when they emptied the family home (a Spider-Man scene did make it down the shore, and was sold at a family garage sale for a few bucks to a guy who remembered building the same one as a kid and was reacquiring a bit of his past), and Hurricane Sandy destroyed a lot of stuff that was moved down.

Jump forward to the late 90's and a visit to the Pearl store in Woodbridge.  It occupied a large retail space which gave them room for a lot of hobby stuff, such as doll houses (and accessories) and plastic model kits.  One day they had a clearance sale display near the front door of model kits and I saw a familiar car- a 1995 GMC Sonoma pick-up, which was the identical twin to the 1996 Chevrolet S-10 that I owned at the time.  Couldn't pass up the opportunity to build a car that I actually owned.  I eventually picked up a small can of red spray paint for the body and an assortment of the familiar Testors bottles for everything else (a color booklet Chevy put out at the time I bought the truck had great photos of the undercarriage, making it easy to get accurate results) and it didn't take long to make my own little truck.

Being able to see a 3D model of the vehicle from whatever angle would be needed would make it easy to put an accurate truck in at exactly the perspective I needed.  Unfortunately, it had not turned up in any of the places I had looked for it in recent days.  I knew that it had survived the move to my current residence, having used the model and instruction sheet as part of demonstration of car building as part of a project for my 3D Design class last fall and spring.

The weather today was miserable, a heavy rain already falling before I was even out of bed and continuing as a nor'easter decided to hang out over Jersey all day.  A good day to work inside, and I devoted a few more hours to trying to get my reference.  More unsuccessful searches for the built model, and looking at hundreds of images on the web, none of which where from the angle I needed.  And it was way too wet to try to draw from an actual truck.  So I gave up my model search for the moment and started looking for particular old magazine references (relates to a current class I'm teaching) and of course within minutes I found the model.  On a high shelf at the back of my bedroom closet.  Not sure why I chose to store it there, but I'm sure it was part of the cleaning I had to do in preparation for a cable re-wiring that went on over the summer.

A quick rough sketch showed that it would fit exactly like I had expected.  The storm is expected to still be here tomorrow, so whether I drive up to Ocean Grove or just work at my kitchen table, it will be a day for drawing indoors.  Results will be posted tomorrow.