Festival of Sail

6/16/17 inks, water-soluble colored pencils

The day dawned with typical mid-June wishy-washiness: It could end up with “sun breaks” just as easily as it could rain. I took a chance on the former to join Urban Sketchers Tacoma at Foss Waterway, which was the site of this weekend’s Festival of Sail.

6/16/17 gel pen, brush pen, colored pencils

With my landscape-format Stillman & Birn sketchbook on the panorama setting, I tried to squeeze in as many as I could of the dozen or more tall ships across the waterway. It was the first time I’d seen Tacoma’s skyline from that direction, so even though my focus was on the ships, I couldn’t resist putting in Old City Hall (left of center).

My next plan was to make a detailed sketch of one of the ships – the only one that had some of its sails up (it’s near the center of the panorama). Since white rigging is always a bother to save out in a sketch on white paper, I took the easy way out and sketched it on red paper.

I always seem to have five or 10 minutes left to kill before the sketchbook throwdown, so I used them to capture the row of snags (one of them was home to a family of flickers) next to the waterway where Natalie and Beverly were sketching.

The morning’s gamble was a good one: Not a drop of rain all day, and despite the chilly wind and thick cloud cover, we had a good turnout of enthusiastic sketchers.

6/16/17 brush pen

Panorama detail