Old-School Seattle Snow

 

2/6/25 Maple Leaf neighborhood, about 8:30 a.m.

As much as I can see without putting on boots.

The first good snow of the season is always a novelty in these parts. People post photos of their streets on Facebook, and a couple of inches will close schools. Unfortunately for kids, they don’t get a snow day – they have to attend class online. (Pandemic preparedness sure ruined snow days!) With temps above freezing, the wet, heavy snowfall last week was pretty first thing in the morning when I sketched this but soon turned into a slushy mess. This is old-school, Seattle-style snow – not that newfangled climate change stuff we got several years ago.

It was trash day, and everyone optimistically put their bins out the previous night. Unfortunately, all the pickups were delayed all over the city. I didn’t care about that; I was just grateful I didn’t lose power as many areas did.

Technical note: How I’ve missed graphite and all pencils! The markers I’ve been using for the better part of a year have been fun and expeditious (and just right for the comics approach I’ve been focused on), but making this sketch with a Blackwing made my heart soar in a way that using markers never will!

The day before the solid snowfall, we got an inch of "teaser" snow that
was gone by noon. During my afternoon walk when the snow was starting
again, I spotted this quintessential Seattle snowman!

To-Go is the New For-Here

 

2/5/25 Cloud City Coffee

One unfortunate outcome of the pandemic is that after cafes were allowed to serve food and beverages with reusables again, many decided to stay with disposables. I’m sure that using takeout boxes and paper cups is easier than washing and managing breakable plates and ceramic mugs, so I understand that decision from the often-understaffed café business perspective. But when I intend to stay in a café to sketch, I miss feeling like I am “here.” Even if I say “for here,” I often receive my refreshments as if I am “going.”

Like some regulars who come to Cloud City Coffee, I could bring my own mug to avoid a disposable cup, and I always used to do that when I drove to most cafes. That would make me feel better from an environmental perspective. I guess I should just do that again, but now I always try to walk to my coffee breaks (that’s one way I justify having a pastry), and I don’t like carrying a cup while I walk. Moreover, using my own cup wouldn’t address my personal issue of wanting to feel like I’m “here” and not “going.”

Sigh. Yet another first-world problem (or maybe it’s just my existential one).

Lunch at PCC

 

2/4/25 PCC Green Lake cafe 

After standing on the sidewalk for five very cold minutes to sketch the tree that was no longer there, I was relieved to warm up inside PCC Green Lake’s café to sketch and have lunch with Natalie. While I devoured a burrito too quickly to sketch, I noticed a man wearing a fantastic hat. He was still there when I finished eating, so I got him just in time before he left.

My other favorite sketch in this page spread is the man at lower left (he may look like he’s sketching, but I think he was working on a newspaper crossword puzzle). For a while now, I’ve been deliberately trying to draw less than what I see: Make as few marks as possible while still conveying the story (I talk about it briefly in this post from last year and more recently in this one). I could see that he didn’t have hair, but I didn’t have to draw that bald pate for you to imagine it, right?

Color Temperature with Sarah Bixler

 

Prismacolor and Polychromos palettes recommended by Sarah Bixler

Although I’ve taken quite a few classes and workshops in the past decade with colored pencils and watercolor pencils as the primary medium, none has intrigued me as much as the ones I’ve had with Sarah Bixler. My introduction in 2021 was a weekend workshop with portraiture as the focus. Still reassembling my brain after having it blown open with new concepts, I took another workshop a few weeks later that was similar but used the full figure as our subject.

In both cases, it wasn’t necessarily life drawing that interested me; it was her focus on color temperature and her application of colored pencils with a strong painterly approach.

Polychromos

For quite a while afterwards, I worked on trying to apply her principles and approach to urban sketching, but I realized I still had so much more to learn to think like a painter. When I saw that she was offering another class, I jumped on it. Instead of in-studio weekend workshops like the previous two were, this course is five weeks, which I’ve found to be the most effective format for me when I want to get a solid handle on complex concepts.

 “Interpreting the Portrait” again focuses on the portrait, and this one is online. Typically I wouldn’t be interested in taking a life-drawing course online, but since the subject is less important to me than the concepts, I decided that learning from photos would be OK. After nearly a year of trying something entirely different with a comics approach using mostly markers, I’m super excited to get my brain back into color, color temperature and especially colored pencils!

To begin with, Sarah recommended a specific palette of Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils based on color temperature (a cool and a warm of each hue, plus some grays, black and white), which I was already familiar with from her previous workshops. A former user of Prismacolors, she now prefers Polychromos, but not because of expected reasons such as hardness or color range; she just got tired of contemporary Prismacolors breaking all the time!

For the kind of application technique she uses, I prefer a softer core than Polychromos. Hearing her reason for favoring them, I used the Polychromos palette she had specified as a guide and pulled out comparable hues from my Prismacolors (vintage, of course, to avoid the breakage issue). I plan to try both as the course goes on.

Prismacolor (mostly vintage plus a few contemporary)

In an online course from home, I would normally have my full sets easily accessible. But my studio has been in a transitional mess for the past several months, and I’m starting to pack my drawing desk (poor timing with this class, I know!). With the hope of avoiding constantly digging through packing boxes, I’m acting like I’m taking an in-person class and filled a pencil case with the two limited palettes. It’s a stretch of the imagination, I know, but I’m pretending these are the only colored pencils I own! (Ha-ha, I can hear you chuckling!)

For today’s post, which is already long, I’ll just show you the palettes. When I finish the first week’s assignment, I’ll write a separate post.

Paying Respects

2/4/25 Green Lake neighborhood
(a 5-minute sketch because it was 38 degrees!)

I’m glad I sketched it last month when I could: The maple tree that stood outside my yoga instructor’s studio was cut down last week. The next time I was in the neighborhood, I stopped by to pay respects.

It looks so empty there now. But after the pavement gets fixed, most passers-by will not remember that a tree grew there for more than a hundred years – planted long before all the buildings on that block were built. I’m sure I’ve done it many times, too – passed a spot where a tree used to be, but I didn’t even notice that it had disappeared at some point. That’s why it’s important to sketch the ones I do remember.

Office Chair

2/2/25 Greg's office chair

Other than the jukebox, the only object I needed to remove before I could move into my new studio was Greg’s office chair. (I’m keeping his two desks already occupying the room, both of which are larger than the ones in my current studio.) Although he used it for something like 20 years, it’s still in good condition (better than mine, in fact, but mine fits me better).

Even though it kept getting in my way as I emptied file drawers and moved boxes around, I put off getting rid of his chair until the very end. Greg had spent a lot of hours in that chair – doing the usual computer tasks but also viewing, sorting and editing his vast collection of photos. As a digital photographer, he spent much more time futzing with his photos in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop than he did taking the photos. He might come home from a two-week trip with thousands of images, but then he’d take the next year or more messing around with them digitally. For him, that was a lot of the fun of it.

While I was transferring all those image files so that I could dispose of his PC, I sat in his chair (which is how I learned that it’s not as comfortable as my own old office chair). It prompted complicated feelings I can’t quite articulate. A person’s things are not the person; and yet, some things become very personal. He could still sit in that chair now, but he has no use for it.

Somehow it helped me to get rid of it by posting a “give” in my neighborhood’s Buy Nothing Group. It turned out that the woman who wanted the chair for her teenage son lives less than half a block away! Although it was a bit of a struggle getting it down the two short flights of stairs from the porch to the street, she easily wheeled it down the sidewalk the rest of the way. It made me happy that the chair had introduced me to a neighbor I didn’t know, even though her family has lived there for eight years. And the chair has moved only a short distance away.

Seacuterie

2/1/25 My seacuterie dinner

During the decades when Greg and I both worked full time, one of our favorite ways to unwind on Friday nights was to put together a charcuterie dinner washed down with beer or 2-buck Chuck while we watched rented movies on VHS and DVDs (the pre-streaming days). “Charcuterie” is probably an overstatement; we just put out whatever lazy, easy stuff we had in the fridge or pantry – canned fish and oysters, cheese, crackers, dip, pickles, olives – and called it good. And it was good. So good, in fact, that we kept it going after we retired and no longer had an excuse for such laziness (except that retirement is made for laziness). And now that I live alone, I’m lazier than ever (at least about meal prep)!

I can’t even recall now what I was searching for, but one day a few months ago, I ended up on YouTube plunging headlong into a rabbit hole of – wait for it – people reviewing “tinned” fish (“tinned” is more trendy than “canned”). They eat the contents straight out of the can in front of a video camera. Apparently tinned fish initially caught fire on TikTok (doesn’t everything of any value begin on TikTok?), and now everyone wants to eat it, talk about it, and talk about it while eating it.

That’s how I learned that this thing we’d been doing for decades is called a “seacuterie” or “conservas board.” People put out tins on a tray and serve them to guests, and it’s considered cool and fancy! Who knew we were cool and fancy! 

And the tins have become fancy, too. I’m used to $2 cans of sardines from Costco, but that rabbit hole taught me that you can now buy cans upwards of $20! I won’t go that far, but my curiosity led me to cans of sardines, salmon and mackerel in the $5-to-$10 range, and I admit, they are way better than the ones from Costco. Damnit – now I’m doomed to buy $5 and $10 sardines for the rest of my life. (This is starting to sound like art supplies: After using Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles, how can I go back to Supracolors?)

Tinned fish purchased and eaten in Porto

It never would have occurred to me to sketch my simple “seacuterie” meal, but now that I know I’m trendy (and have been for a long time), I felt I must. (In fact, sardines are considered to be “hot girl food” – so now I’m not only trendy; I’m hot!)

One more thing related to tinned fish: One of many delights we discovered in Portugal was the unbelievably fantastic selection of tinned seafood available there. Portugal, the sardine and anchovy capital of the world, offers canned fish in conserveira shops, where shelves are stacked with extraordinarily beautiful, colorful tins. We couldn’t resist buying a bunch in Porto. We ate them all for breakfast during the rest of the trip because we didn’t want to haul the heavy cans home in our luggage. Best tinned fish ever! What a treat! (The beginning of this video shows a Lisbon restaurant that serves canned fish! That’s an even lazier dining experience than my seacuterie . . . at least I open the cans myself!) 

Almost as pretty as an art supply store!