Bostwick Café

4/30/18 Bostwick Cafe in Tacoma

Jane and I met the other day to take care of some administrative business for the USk 10x10 workshop program. We promised ourselves that we’d get to sketch after the meeting was over. It was a good motivator to do the work efficiently so that we could play.

Bostwick Café, which occupies the old Tully’s space in the heart of Tacoma’s antique district, is another weird old building like the Top Pot in West Seattle – it’s on a strange corner, so none of the walls seem to meet at right angles! (I was there when it was still Tully’s several years ago, but that day I sketched the grand Rialto Theater through the window.) I let Jane tackle that view.

Facing the opposite direction, I saw that the walls lined up the way I expected them to, but I had a different challenge: A short passageway with a lower ceiling connected the café with a second dining area. Once again using the handy perspective shortcuts I learned in Andika Murandi’s workshop, I made my trapezoids and triangles, but it was like drawing three rooms simultaneously.

A mini-sketchcrawl after the meeting!

The most important thing about making this sketch is that I made it at all. Before being introduced to Andika’s concepts, I would have looked at that scene and dismissed it as lacking interest. Although I enjoy a challenge, sometimes when I don’t know how to approach what I see, I don’t even know how to look for something about it that interests me. Because I had a mechanism for framing the composition, I saw immediately that it would be an intriguing challenge.

The more I understand about drawing, the more is available for me to draw, and the more I enjoy drawing.