Regional Sketchcrawl at MOHAI on Opening Day

5/3/14 Platinum Carbon and Diamine Grey inks, watercolor,
Zig markers, Canson XL 140 lb. paper

“It always rains on Opening Day of boating season.”

A friend who is an avid boater told me that many years ago, and so far, she has been right more often than not about every first Saturday of May. After an unseasonably warm and sunny week, right on cue, it rained today on all the boaters and people watching the parade of boats.

I had been looking forward to joining the regional Urban Sketchers outing this morning at the Museum of History and Industry, where the Portland USk group had gathered to see Gabi Campanario’s “Drawn to Seattle”exhibit before it closes in a few weeks. But since I’ve sketched inside MOHAI several times the past few months, I really wanted to sketch something outdoors today.

It was still barely spitting when I started this sketch of the Swiftsure, a 110-year-old lightship moored on Lake Union right outside MOHAI, and the clouds were thin enough that I could even catch a few shadows. But the raindrops got bigger by the minute, so I ducked under an overhang to finish painting. Eventually it started raining hard enough that I went inside with most of the other sketchers, who had found windows to sketch through.

When we shared sketchbooks, we found that almost every one of us had sketched one of the many ships moored outside MOHAI – an appropriate subject for Opening Day.