Beneath the Ramp

11/24/18 Under the First Avenue South ramp

Seattle’s best brick-and-mortar art supply store is Daniel Smith. Fortunately for my budget, the store is not convenient to me, so I don’t go there as often as I’d like. The email I received for the store’s Black Friday weekend sale, however, was more than I could resist – 20 percent off everything in the store!

A fresh stash of staples.

After stocking up on Stillman & Birn sketchbooks and a couple of Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Markers, I returned to my car, which was parked beneath the First Avenue South freeway ramp adjacent to the store. The triangle of light formed by the ramp, its support beams and the industrial buildings under it caught my eye.

About five minutes into the sketch, I regretted that I didn’t have my gray-toned S & B Nova sketchbook with me! It would have saved me quite a bit of time applying all that graphite to the white page. But isn’t that always the Catch-22 for every urban sketcher? Whichever book you want is the one that’s still at home.