Hazy

8/10/17 Skyline from Harvard Avenue East on Capitol Hill

While we were in Chicago, smoke from wildfires in western Canada began blanketing the Pacific Northwest. By the time we returned home on Aug. 4, some of the smoke had dissipated, but not all. When looking at the sky it was sometimes hard to distinguish smoke from a white overcast, but the light coming through windows had a distinctly yellowish cast to it. Sometimes eerie, sometimes beautiful (at sunset), the smoky air was nonetheless disconcerting.

All last week I was trying to figure out how to sketch that disturbing haze. On Thursday morning I was on my way to Capitol Hill when I saw a particularly gloomy skyline, despite the otherwise sunny day. I remembered that Harvard Avenue East, which parallels Interstate 5, has a panoramic view of that skyline, so I pulled off the freeway and drove over to the lookout I had in mind. Two years ago Greg and I had explored this particular spot as a potential site for fireworks viewing, and I recalled sketching the Olympics behind the Aurora Bridge and Lake Union. This sketch looks a bit further south than my previous sketch, and all I could see were the gray silhouettes of skyscrapers and the Needle – no mountains anywhere. 

Fortunately, the next day the last of the smoke finally started to dissipate, and we had clear skies for our extravaganza sketching weekend (well, except for the normal overcast on Sunday).