Monday Morning Art: Chicago Tracks

So, I was a bit exhausted after having too much fun at The Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo in Louisville over the weekend, so I didn’t have the energy to do a full-blown piece of art when I got back Sunday afternoon.

Instead, I took a pencil rough intended for a future watercolor rough and tightened it up with the trusty Blackwing Palomino, and that’s what you see above.

It is inspired by a view looking out of the back of the last car on the Brown Line on the L in Chicago, several minutes after we left the station at Kimball. The Brown line starts and ends in Kimball because it goes through the Loop and then comes back.  If you ride it all the way to Kimball, you have to get off, then get back on the same train (unless you have something to do in Kimball, that is).

We did that, but when we got back on we grabbed a seat looking out of the back of the last car, so that we could see the tracks behind us. What made that extra cool is that the last three stops (or the first three, depending on how you look at it) of the Brown line are neither subway, nor elevated. They are at street level.

It’s like having a train line going through an alley, with people’s backyards on each side.  It has some unique views.  However, the many reference photos I took also show how dirty the window was. I had to fill in a lot of blanks with my imagination as there were streaks and smudges and avian poopage obscuring the view.

So I did a few rough pencil sketches with the intention of eventually painting over them. But this one got extra pencil work so I could bring it to you today. There’s still quite a bit of laziness in there.

If you want to see this image larger click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR,  we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with an encore of the very first episode of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page. Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

Tonight at 8 PM, tune in for a classic edition of The Comedy Vault. That’s followed by two-hour blocks of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast at 9 PM and 11 PM, and then an overnight assortment of our Haversham Recording Institute programs at 1 AM.