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6/9/24 North Fremont |
When most people think of Fremont, the troll, Lenin, and the monument to JP and Gertrude probably come to mind. That’s
what I think of, anyway, and that southern end of Fremont is the only part I’ve
spent any time sketching. On Fremont’s northern edge, though, where the
neighborhood butts up against Phinney Ridge, it’s a little less “Center of the Universe-y” and more working class or maybe just more neighborhood-y.
To celebrate a friend’s birthday, we decided to meet at Uneeda Burger, which is housed in a building that must have been a garage at some
point. The sunny deck in front was an ideal spot to devour messy, drippy
burgers (both animal- and plant-based and taller than they were wide) on a
lovely Sunday.
Arriving a little early to make time to sketch (and finished after
lunch and a fun visit to the Fremont Sunday Market), I captured a few other
buildings visible from the intersection of North 44th and Fremont
Avenue North. The oldest was probably the Fremont Abbey Arts Center, a
1914 brick building that was originally St. Paul’s Lutheran Church.
Process notes: Like my old apartment building, none of
these buildings struck me as particularly sketchworthy. The lighting wasn’t
great on any of them, and let’s face it, I’m generally not a fan of sketching buildings
just for the sake of sketching buildings (unless I’m in Amsterdam, Coimbra or Kyoto, of course). I’ve noticed, though, an interesting change in my attitude
about architecture since I began making on-location comics. Because each
sketch tends to be no more than thumbnail size to fit several on a comic-style spread,
it’s much easier and faster to draw any building, even if it doesn’t interest
me much. I look at each as simply a part of the larger story – in this case, an
intersection in north Fremont – and it has become much more enjoyable to sketch
these sometimes ho-hum structures. I don’t worry about getting angles or
perspective right; I just choose a building’s corner and simplify it enough to
fit into 2 or 3 inches. And I end up liking these small sketches much more than
building portraits that I might fuss over for much longer. That’s a huge,
unexpected benefit of embracing comics!