Fueled by Clouds & Coffee: Lake Union Park with New Friends

6/18/22 Space Needle from Lake Union Park

Urban sketchers and fans of products from Traveler’s Company and Art Toolkit have a lot in common: They all love documenting their days, and they all love fun sketching tools! Seattle urban sketcher and Traveler’s rep April Wu invited USk Seattle to help introduce urban sketching to users of Traveler’s Company art journaling materials. In addition, Maria Coryell-Martin, developer of the Art Toolkit, gave a demo and showed her popular portable watercolor kits at the event last Saturday. It was fun to meet new sketchers, and we hope they’ll continue to join USk at future outings.

The chosen location, Lake Union Park, is one of my favorites, and it was a productive afternoon for me: Several compositional studies, a couple of which made the cut for larger, color sketches. A bonus was the gesture sketches I got of the many critters hanging out near the water.

First on my list of priorities was documenting the Space Needle, which was recently repainted in its original “Galaxy Gold” to commemorate its 60^th birthday. I tried a composition with the Needle next to the Museum of History and Industry’s old clock, but I didn’t like it enough to do a full-color sketch. A walk around the park led me to some large purple allium flowers that seemed a perfect contrast to the orange Needle.

As many times as I’ve sketched at Lake Union Park, I don’t think I had captured the Center of Wooden Boats building before. To me, it’s not a very interesting modern building, so I looked for a composition that would frame it. While I sketched, some aggressive Canada geese walked right up to me, honking their demands for food! Anyone who gets in my face like that should know they will be sketched.