San Francisco Bay - in Pastel

Eight years ago, in early 2002, my father and I spent one morning drawing a satellite map. Using pastel crayons.


It was the new year, just after Christmas, and I'd received a book from my paternal grandparents called 'Mapping the World' by Nathaniel Harris. I was highly into maps at the time. Using the book, we colored a satellite photo of the San Francisco Bay Area.


We produced a good effort:

San Francisco Bay Area, pastel, Justin Campbell

San Francisco Bay Area, pastel, Robert Bissett

Both images were drawn on January 5th, 2002. I was ten years old at the time. Both pictures tend to represent the area as how it looked prior to when the city developed over it; both pictures have greenery and marsh, cliffs and rocky areas, mountains and dirt hills.

You can get a wide-ranging variety using pastel crayons because they're very easy to manipulate on paper; when we did these my father taught me the idea of smudging the color on the paper with one's thumb to mix it up. The result is a very diverse mixture of color and shade.

It's also interesting with the dynamic you can get from a satellite image - the wide range of color and the landscape.

For reference, here is what the area actually looks like:

Google Earth Image

I would have included what the image looked like in the book, but I can't scan a book due to copyright issues.

Isn't this an interesting perspective? Art and geography mixed together.

Justin Campbell