Stroke by stroke, sketcher captures 'soul of a person'

Ed Velandria sketched riders on the New York subway during his commute. He first started drawing people on the subway for a high school art assignment. (CAROLYN COLE/LOS ANGELES TIMES)

NEW YORK - The F train howls to a stop, and the subway sketcher boards a front car, its windows clouded with white spray paint, its benches filled with characters. He takes a seat, pulling a computer tablet and touch pen from his black backpack.

Ed Velandria skims the crowd as he listens to Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" through his iPhone earbuds. Velandria has 20 minutes to draw on this ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and he is searching for his next muse.

Tall, dark-haired, and unassuming, Velandria is a corporate graphics guy with a family and brownstone in Brooklyn. He drew his first illustration in third grade - a pumpkin. The moment marked his love for drawing, but for more than a decade, he rarely did it for enjoyment. His career got the best of him, and his creativity slipped away.

Two years ago, he bought a computerized painting tablet and carted it along on his commute, sketching people he found interesting. The tablet is the size of a thin phone book, and its touch pen simulates dozens of brushes and pencils blending colors with thick and thin strokes directly onto the computer screen. He uploaded YouTube instructional illustration videos on his iPhone and studied them on breaks.

He found Flickr, a Web community for image collections, and posted his pieces. Fans found him and sent messages or posted his drawings on their blogs. He came across subway sketchers from Toronto, Berlin, Paris. They formed an online family, commenting on each other's work.

Just like that, Velandria, 45, found his creative self again. Subway sketching in the modern technology world became his therapy and his obsession.

On the F train just after 10 a.m., five deaf teenage boys speak in sign language, and a chubby man in a yarmulke and Navy blazer stares. Two middle-aged Asian women sit across the aisle. One has a marble-sized mole on her chin, and the other tilts her head back at an awkward angle, her eyes closed. Velandria fixates on the sleeping woman, and his right hand dances across his tablet.

The deaf boys notice and hover behind Velandria in fascination, signing rapidly to each other. The man in the yarmulke rises from his seat and leans over Velandria's shoulder, watching the swirls of yellow, green, and gray fuse into the contours of the woman's face.

The sleeping woman wakes up and gets off a few minutes later, unaware that she has become a work of art soon to be displayed to the world online. The train stops in Soho, and Velandria packs up his tablet with its two nearly complete portraits. "That's what's enjoyable," he says once outside the station. "You don't know how long they will stay."

Velandria first began sketching people on the subway in high school - he rode the F train then, too - as an assignment for drawing class. His mother instilled an artistic streak in him and his two sisters. He remembers that she painted her own versions of Picassos and hung them at home. After graduating from high school, Velandria took a job in advertising.

Then Velandria met his wife, Roxanna Plemons-Velandria, an artist from Texas, and they started a graphic design company and had two children, now 8 and 10. In 1993, Velandria's sister died of pneumonia, and he and his wife took custody of her son, now 14.

Velandria was a long-distance runner until a doctor's visit led to the discovery that he had kidney disease. It turned out his wife was a perfect match for a transplant. But his running career was over.

For years, he had only a few images jotted on scraps of paper or napkins to show for his art. One day during his recovery, he loaded a paint program onto his PDA hand-held phone, and he doodled. Then he found the computerized tablet and bought it from a student for $1,200. Since then, he has posted about 500 sketches online.

"Everyone is so different, no matter how much you lump people together," he said. "I guess my ultimate goal is to really capture the soul of a person."