Meet the Correspondent: Marcia Milner-Brage > Cedar Falls, USA

I’ve drawn my whole life. As a five-year-old in the backseat of my family’s 1950 Oldsmobile on a trip from Kansas to California, I tried to capture with pencil and paper those animal-shaped clouds sailing by. Across the years: sketching my then infant son as he napped to drawing my elderly mother’s hands on the day she died—drawing is one of the few continuous strands that runs through my life. Through joy and loss, busyness and ease, it’s always been a dependable way for me to name my life going by.

My favorite tools: a 5B pencil, Neocolor II water soluble wax pastels, and watercolors. I value the time and physicality to sit and look at something for a good long time, while my hand serves as scribe.

In 2010, I stumbled across the Urban Sketcher Flickr and Urban Sketcher Blog. Urban Sketchers gave me a new assignment and vitality. I launched into drawing landscapes of my Cedar Falls, Iowa neighborhood. Each drawing made me see and appreciate my longtime home more. I posted them on Flickr and Facebook and received invaluable encouragement from the Urban Sketcher community. In 2013, this flurry of work became my one-person exhibit, Drawing the Town, at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls.

Cedar Falls—a small, Midwestern US city—is as worthy a subject as any of the great metropolises or bucket-list worthy destinations I’ve been to. When the weather is nice, about half the year, I draw outside. Otherwise, I draw inside, looking out. This drawing—Windowsill Hickory Nuts, Winter Outside—is looking from my kitchen window on a February day. As a Correspondent, I’m thrilled to give you a window on my world. I look forward to your response.

• Marcia's sketches on flickr