Graphite

 

5/23/23 Graphite, downtown Edmonds

The most exciting urban sketching event to happen in Seattle since pre-pandemic is this July’s Sketcher Fest, a weekend of workshops, sketch walks, book fair and all-around sketching fun. Held in Edmonds, 20 minutes north of Seattle, Sketcher Fest is the brain child of Gabi Campanario, who hopes the event will be a model for more events like it around the country.

As part of the festivities, Sketcher Fest has partnered with Graphite in Edmonds, a beautiful gallery and studio workspace for artists, to put on an exhibit of urban sketches and sketchbooks. I’m both thrilled and humbled to be included in the show alongside many of Seattle’s best urban sketchers.

After dropping off my work at the gallery, I stood across the street to draw the huge Graphite building – one of the most challenging architectural sketches I’ve attempted in a long time! So many weird, unexpected angles – whew! The building actually stretches further in both directions, but this was all I could get in without a panorama-format sketchbook. (And being able to scale even this much on a 4-by-6-inch page is something I owe to Gabi.)

Pointless to use graphite.

(If you’re thinking that surely I should have made this sketch with graphite, you’re not the only one. Unfortunately, when I pulled a Blackwing pencil out to do that, this is what it looked like (and the only sharpener I had with me was the one that fits thicker colored pencils!). Luckily, I always have a mechanical pencil in my bag, so I could still block in the sketch with graphite (but not the kind I would want to draw with).