Plymouth Pillars

7/13/17 water-soluble colored pencils

After the big 1965 quake damaged the Plymouth Congregational Church, it had to be taken down, but the four entrance columns were saved and reinstalled at the corner of Pike and Boren. After meeting a friend for coffee at the Starbucks Roastery up the street from the park, I took the opportunity to sketch them. (If they look familiar, it’s because you saw them in the background of the photos I took when I was at this pocket park earlier this week with the Northwest School students.)

With this sketch, I tried something a little different from my typical “coloring book” approach (drawing an outline and then coloring it in). It’s a bit more painterly (or at least that was my hope) and similar to how I’ve been doing still lives – using only colored pencils to both draw and color, and not relying on gray ink or markers for shading. In this case, it wasn’t more time consuming, yet it was somehow more challenging. I was trying to think in the same way that painters do when they hit the paper directly with paint without a drawing first. I know it’s easier with colored pencils, since they are essentially drawing tools, compared to using a brush with liquid, but old habits die hard. 

Overall, I like this approach, but my shading feels wimpy compared to using ink or markers. I’m going to work on intensifying values more.