The Burke on a Rainy Saturday

3/1/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown ink, Sailor pen,
Canson XL 140 lb. paper

Planning to meet a friend in the U-District, I put a little extra time on my parking meter and ducked out of the rain into the Burke Museum. I generally avoid going there on Saturdays, when it’s filled with hundreds of kids. Given the rainy weather, today it was filled with thousands of kids, maybe millions, all apparently working on a scavenger’s hunt.

I managed to find a quiet spot right under the tusks of a mastodon, which I had sketched almost a year ago from a different angle. Then as I sketched, a Boy Scout troop hammed it up near the mastadon’s legs as their fathers took photos. My neck was sore by the time I finished.

With only a few minutes left, I made a quick sketch of the head and part of the neck of an Elasmosaur, a marine reptile that lived more than 80 million years ago. If you think the part I sketched is scary enough, you should see its entire skeleton – so large that it’s going to be difficult to sketch in one shot. I’ve got to get back to the Burke again soon – not on a Saturday – and figure out a vantage point to sketch the whole thing. (Edited 3/7/14: See the full skeleton sketched later.)

3/1/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown ink, Sailor pen

Actually, there’s at least one other good reason to get back to the Burke: It will soon be the home of an 8 ½-foot-long mammoth tusk that was found in Seattle a few weeks ago at a construction site. The tusk hasn’t been carbon dated yet, but it’s thought to be between 22,000 to 60,000 years old.