This is the first piece that I have created of Mystic, Connecticut, a place where we used to go as a family while I was growing up. There has always been something magical about the Mystic Drawbridge, and even as an adult, this bridge over a quaint New England downtown evokes more than a bit of magic.

After I returned from Italia and my first visit to the Mediterranean, I realized how much I missed the ocean. So I decided to work on this piece. While I began with my usual sequence of pencil sketch on Bristol Board, which progressed to ink, I did work in some new approaches to capture the light.

Rather than leaving the sunnier areas of the building white, or attempting to pop some shadows in using grey or blue, I decided to drop in a bit of yellow and a coppery-brown. This not only helped warm up what could have been a very cold picture due to the blues, but it also is one of the first representations of me "playing with light" using underpainting with watercolors.