A Bit About Buffalo

One of the locations for my Kickstarter project is Buffalo New York. The concept behind my Kickstarter is to map all the locations that show my brother’s journey in life. He passed away suddenly three years ago, and as his birthday approaches (its next week) I am thinking of him more and more.  I chose to include Buffalo because my brother went to college for awhile there. He was an ice hockey player and loved cold weather, so it seemed like a natural choice.
As I am drawing the city, I have been thinking a lot about how our identity is so linked to the places where we live. With each little block of color that I apply to a page, that colorful little block represents a neighborhood, a street, a community. Individual lives are lived within these blocks of color.  
I find it very meditative to apply the color deliberately, and to think about all of the people that identify with that place on the map. I imagine their lives; I envision families eating dinner together, a mother bringing home her newborn baby, a high school student getting their college acceptance letter, a grandpa working at his workbench, children laughing and playing on a playground, two people falling in love over a romantic date, a business owner straightening up his storefront, etc. I imagine all of the people that live within my blocks of color and think about how many  of those people my brother may have come in contact with. He only lived there for a little while, but I like to imagine him there- I like to think of him as once being one of my colorful little blocks.
Thats it. Have a good day everyone.