Stonehouse Cafe (Test 3)

7/8/16 inks, colored pencils

A tribute is being made to the memory of Florian Afflerbach for the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Manchester: a wall of sketches of cars and other vehicles. Although I have sketched several classic cars at the Greenwood Car Show, I wanted to make a new sketch in his well-known fisheye style. I wasn't sure if I'd see a vintage vehicle in time for the symposium, but somehow these things seem to turn up serendipitously. Sure enough, I met with Urban Sketchers Seattle this morning at the Stonehouse Cafe (where we sketched for the first time last fall), and parked in front was the owner's beautifully restored '53 Chevy truck.

7/8/16 brush pen, Gelly Roll gel pen

And how's this for more serendipity? I don't usually carry a blue Field Notes notebook in my bag, but this morning I grabbed it on sheer whim as I was walking out the door. In the back of the restaurant near the gazebo was a stack of Adirondack chairs -- in the very same shade of blue!

7/8/16 brush pen, colored pencils

In other news, the vintage truck sketch filled the last page of the last signature I had stitched, so I decided to break in the new softcover Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbook I reviewed a while back. It's definitely heavier and thicker than a single signature of paper, but the same number of pages takes up less than half the horizontal space on a bookshelf as a handbound volume. The Alpha paper may end up feeling too flimsy after using 140-pound paper all this time, but since I'm not using watercolor as much as I used to, the 100-pound Alpha may do just fine. I'm determined to fill the book and see how it goes. (Not while traveling, however -- I still plan to hand-bind sketches from my upcoming trip to the UK.)

(This is test 3 of mobile blogging. I uploaded images using the Blogger desktop dashboard, which is horrible on my tiny phone screen, but that seems to be the only way I can retain the full image size. Then I switched to the Blogaway app on my phone and typed the text. I'm going to add hyperlinks later from the desktop, since there doesn't seem to be a way to do that from this kludgy app. Glad I don't do this for a living.)