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| 6/29/24 Greenwood Car Show |
(I still have a couple more posts planned about my visit to
Portland, but I’m interrupting the series to report on my favorite event of the
summer.)
One year, it rained. Another, it was so cold
that I had to retreat to a coffee shop midway to warm up. On Saturday USk
Seattle was treated to a rare day in June for the Greenwood Car Show: the ideal
temperature for sketching under a mix of sunny and partly cloudy skies. It’s
always a fun event – except for the pandemic pause, I think I’ve only missed
one year since 2014 – and it’s even more fun to sketch with USk Seattle.
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My personal tradition is to arrive early before the show officially
opens, get coffee at Herkimer, and watch the cars roll in.
The tables outside Herkimer are a great place to catch dogs
waiting for their humans to come back out with treats. |
Usually my approach is to make portraits of several cars that attract my fancy and one or two sketches that show more context. This year I took a comics approach by making multiple small sketches that show various views of this neighborhood show. The sketches are so small that they don’t take much time, so I cover more ground and capture more of the overall car show story – and history.
Owners love to talk about what they’ve done to their cars,
how much it cost to do that work, and how long they’ve owned them. And passers-by
have memories evoked by cars they see – old models owned by parents or
grandparents, or the ones they used to learn to drive. My favorite story this
year was written on a placard next to a 1966 VW Bug. Its original and current owner,
Florence, had recently celebrated her 100th birthday, and a card was
available for show visitors to write Florence a birthday greeting.
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| Florence's beautifully maintained '66 Bug |
Just for fun, I’m including below one sketch from each of the
previous years I’ve sketched at the Greenwood Car Show.
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| 6/28/14 Rain-spattered! |
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| 6/27/15 '72 Buick Riviera |
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| 6/25/16 '63 Bonneville convertible |
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| 6/24/17 |
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| 6/29/19 |
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| 6/25/22 |
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| 6/24/23 |
I love how you did the sketches of the car show this year. You really covered a lot of it in your comic book style. It looks like I could just step in and walk around.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Joan! I am really enjoying being able to document more with this technique.
DeleteI'm impressed - you're really pretty good at sketching cars and it's interesting to see what you sketched in previous years. And goodness, Florence with her one owner VW!
ReplyDeleteThank you! And yes, it was so cool to see Florence's VW that is still in such good shape! She obviously takes care of it lovingly.
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