@forty_mike_mike: USS North Carolina 27 Aug 2025 Urban sketching isn’t about perfection. It isn’t about pretty. It’s about being there with eyes open, pen in hand, catching the world before it moves on. The rule is simple: draw on location, in the thick of it. Today, I fell in with the Wilmington, NC #UrbanSketch chapter and we set our sights on the USS North Carolina. A battleship with ghosts in the hull, Pacific campaign, WWII. The kind of ship where young sailors once ate, slept, and prayed they’d make it home. Now it’s a museum, open for anyone curious enough to step inside its steel gut. Below deck, the air changes. Narrow passageways, pipes crisscrossing like arteries. Communication rooms humming with silence. Ammunition holds where giant shells once slept. Galleys and butcher blocks where men worked shoulder-to-shoulder. Spaces stacked with bunks that smell of sweat long since gone. I wanted to sketch something less obvious. Not the towering guns, not the postcard view. I found myself wedged behind a hulking generator, staring at a panel of valves, knobs, and dials, like the heartbeat of the ship. For an hour, I let the ink wander across the page. If I closed my eyes, I could hear it again: the hiss of air, the clang of metal, the ship alive. Later, topside, I scrawled the forward guns in the open daylight, then, in the last minutes before the “throwdown,” I sat beneath a weeping willow and drew an old propeller resting in the quiet shade. That’s the thing about urban sketching. No judgment. No trophies. Just people who love to look closely and leave a mark. A record of being there. #urbansketching

Mike Reynolds

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Wednesday 27 August 2025 22:02:12 GMT