Solo Art Play Date

 

1/7/26 Through windows at Seattle Asian Art Museum

I found a rare free afternoon on my calendar with no one to play with, so I took myself out for an art play date last week. My first stop was the Seattle Asian Art Museum, where I had fun sketching white on black a couple of months ago. This time, while I did look at some art I had missed last time, my sketching target was a tree I had spotted previously. The newish wing of SAAM is entirely glass on the side that faces Volunteer Park. Although most museum visitors wouldn’t consider this tree an “exhibit,” its wild and crazy branches reaching out toward the museum captured my attention. I appreciated being able to spend leisurely time sketching it while inside the comfy museum.

Lots of similar values

It was also an ideal opportunity to explore something I’ve been thinking about with my values-based palette. One big problem I have with any scene in flat, consistent lighting, like on an overcast day or indoors with lighting coming from all directions, is that most of the values look the same. This tree scene was typical (at right): Almost everything was the same midtone except the visible wing of the museum, which was light, and the foreground tree was slightly darker. To differentiate the foreground tree from the background trees, which are all about the same hue, too, I tried to use roughly the same values (exaggerating the focal tree a bit) but with different colors. (I pushed this idea a little further in the café sketch that I’ll talk about later.)

By the way, coloring the building with the pale blue I had picked out as one of my light values showed me that the choice was a fail. It was just too pale, so I mixed it with the midtone green just to make it show up on the paper. (When I got home, I immediately replaced the blue with a vibrant but light-valued green.) I also had to outline the building, which I have been trying to avoid with the more painterly approach I’m taking with crayons.

Black Sun, Isamu Noguchi (I have lately been using a very pale blue or pale yellow
Derwent Drawing pencil to write on black-paper sketches. I don't want the text to be
as bright-white as the sketch.)

On my way out of the museum, I stopped to make a quick sketch of Isamu Noguchi’s Black Sun by the parking area. One of my favorite sculptures in Seattle, it has appeared in my sketchbook many times, but this is the first time I sketched it white on black. (Even as I’m newly enchanted by wacky colors, I’m still obsessed with drawing with white!)

For the second part of my play date, I walked to Caffe Ladro. This was a fun scene to attempt with my wacky ideas because it was full of “nothing,” which made it easier to focus on values, it had striking contrasts between the lightest and darkest values, and it also had a lot of midtones that were hard to distinguish. Although everything outside was kind of the same value and in muted hues, I tried to use color (but not local color) to make distinctions. Another example is the man, who was mostly in silhouette against the windows. If I were using something like a single black marker, I’d have difficulty showing the difference between his face and his hat, which were the same dark value. But with the Caran d’Ache Neocolor II crayons, I tried varying the hues without changing the value (below).

1/7/26 Caffe Ladro, Capitol Hill

I suppose all this stuff I’m practicing is second nature to painters – but thinking like a painter is always a challenge for me! (And thinking like a painter has nothing to do with applying paint! I’m way more interested in the former than the latter!)

Neocolors at the cafe

Somewhere in a YouTube or maybe on his blog, James Gurney says that most artists are either line makers or shape makers and are rarely both. I don’t want to be locked into either line or shape; I want to be able to use whichever approach is better for the subject matter or whatever it is I want to convey.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been having a lot of fun with on-location comics, which I enjoy so much as a way to tell the stories of a place. The approach’s format – multiple tiny images on a page – makes simple linework essential, and it’s almost impossible to compose with shapes in such small spaces. Using larger tools like crayons (and, by necessity, a larger format) is really helping me to make this shift to a new approach to color. I haven’t stopped making on-location comics, but I’m ready to give this approach some dedicated focus.

Although I love having art play dates with friends, I realize it’s important to occasionally spend creative time alone to focus on ideas and try new things without socializing. It was a productive afternoon.

Bonus: Sketching the tree at the museum was my first trial of using my new tiny Sendak roll while standing – and it works! I opened the Sendak, folded it backwards and, as I did last summer with the Rickshaw Sinclair, propped it up inside my bag. It’s still a bit awkward, but the big benefit over the Sinclair is that the crayons are easily accessible.

This image might be a bit disorienting without much context: I was carrying my open bag on my shoulder, and this was the view looking down at its contents. The tiny Sendak, folded backward, is propped up inside. The slots keep the Neocolor crayons upright.