Stonehouse Cafe (Test 3)

7/8/16 inks, colored pencils

A tribute is being made to the memory of Florian Afflerbach for the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Manchester: a wall of sketches of cars and other vehicles. Although I have sketched several classic cars at the Greenwood Car Show, I wanted to make a new sketch in his well-known fisheye style. I wasn't sure if I'd see a vintage vehicle in time for the symposium, but somehow these things seem to turn up serendipitously. Sure enough, I met with Urban Sketchers Seattle this morning at the Stonehouse Cafe (where we sketched for the first time last fall), and parked in front was the owner's beautifully restored '53 Chevy truck.

7/8/16 brush pen, Gelly Roll gel pen

And how's this for more serendipity? I don't usually carry a blue Field Notes notebook in my bag, but this morning I grabbed it on sheer whim as I was walking out the door. In the back of the restaurant near the gazebo was a stack of Adirondack chairs -- in the very same shade of blue!

7/8/16 brush pen, colored pencils

In other news, the vintage truck sketch filled the last page of the last signature I had stitched, so I decided to break in the new softcover Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbook I reviewed a while back. It's definitely heavier and thicker than a single signature of paper, but the same number of pages takes up less than half the horizontal space on a bookshelf as a handbound volume. The Alpha paper may end up feeling too flimsy after using 140-pound paper all this time, but since I'm not using watercolor as much as I used to, the 100-pound Alpha may do just fine. I'm determined to fill the book and see how it goes. (Not while traveling, however -- I still plan to hand-bind sketches from my upcoming trip to the UK.)

(This is test 3 of mobile blogging. I uploaded images using the Blogger desktop dashboard, which is horrible on my tiny phone screen, but that seems to be the only way I can retain the full image size. Then I switched to the Blogaway app on my phone and typed the text. I'm going to add hyperlinks later from the desktop, since there doesn't seem to be a way to do that from this kludgy app. Glad I don't do this for a living.)

Meridian Park (Test 2)

7/6/16 Technalo pencil, colored pencil

Here's my second try at blogging remotely. I've simplified the process a bit by giving up on the CamScanner app, which seemed like such a good idea. Unfortunately, images couldn't be resized, and the default size was very small. For this sketch of picnickers at Meridian Park, I simply took a photo of the sketch.

I got several good suggestions from readers about dictating into the phone instead of writing, but my brain is wired so directly to my keyboard that I realized I couldn't think and dictate at the same time. ;-) But this little inexpensive and portable Anker keyboard speeds up phone blogging immensely!

I think I'm good. Ready or not, Manchester symposium, here I come (in three weeks exactly!).

Edited: Now that I'm in the Blogger editor from my desktop, I see that the image still can't be resized -- so the problem is not with CamScanner; it's with Blogaway (the third-party Blogger app I am using instead of the buggy Blogger app). Arggh. Back to the drawing board.

Bings and Rainiers

7/5/16 colored pencils

After strawberries, my favorite early-summer fruit is cherries. Rainiers have the most intense flavor and are more fun to color – that lovely blush of red-orange on yellow. Bings, however, are an indescribable, near-black shade of red that required four colored pencils to try to capture, and I still didn’t get it dark enough. So shiny and sensuous, cherries were the only sketchable bright spot on this gloomy, wet afternoon.

The Flag Next Door

7/4/16 inks, colored pencils

The man next door is eccentric, nosy, crabby and prone to annoying behavior. I won’t go on and on (because I certainly could), but to give you just one example: Whenever our other neighbor’s Labrador starts barking, he goes out to the yard, stands by the fence and yells, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” which only makes the dog bark more. His yelling is far more annoying than the dog’s barking.

The man next door is also the most patriotic person on our street, if patriotism is demonstrated by display of the U.S. flag. Every Memorial Day, Flag Day, Veteran’s Day and certainly Independence Day, he puts his flag up in front of his house, without fail. He has done so for every flag-appropriate holiday in the 28 years that we’ve been neighbors.

Have a happy and safe 4^th of July celebration!

Playing Tourist

7/2/16 ink, colored pencils

Yesterday we had visitors in town, so we got to play tourists. One of our favorite places to take people who haven’t seen Seattle before is the Ballard Locks. Full of boats, aged-but-still-useful technology and a fish ladder for salmon, the Locks are a quintessential Seattle experience, especially in the summer. An old-time jazz band with vocalist were giving a 4^th of July concert in the park, so we stopped for a few minutes to enjoy the music. Usually if we’re entertaining guests, I try to restrain myself from taking time to sketch, so I jumped at this opportunity for a quick one.

Later in the afternoon we made our rounds to another favorite stop for visitors: Gas Works Park. Although I was just there a couple of weeks ago, I never tire of it – the sights of Lake Union and the downtown skyline; the rolling green knolls of Kite Hill; those crazy Gas Works that present a never-ending challenge to sketch. As we sat on a shady bench for a break after walking through the park, I grabbed the opportunity for another quick sketch, this time of a small part of the Gas Works and the TV towers of Queen Anne Hill. (I sat on the very same bench to sketch a more northerly part of the same view last month.)

7/2/16 brush pen, colored pencils, ink

Flower Vendors

6/8/16 ink, colored pencils

Yesterday the farmers market sketch I showed was about values on toned paper. Today it’s all about color – two sketches of flower vendors at markets in June. 

Usually by this time of year my market sketches would be of buskers, my favorite summer sketching subject. I’m not sure if I’m going at the wrong times or to the wrong markets, but I haven’t seen any besides PK Dwyer. It’s been a great season for strawberries and early peaches; I hope it’s not a bad season for buskers. 

6/16/16 inks, colored pencils, watercolor

Three Tones at the Farmers Market

6/29/16 brush pen, Gelly Roll pen, colored pencils

Farmers markets are all about color – flowers, produce, primary-hued tents. The other day in Wallingford, it was hard keeping the colors in my bag, but I’m also interested in exploring values on toned paper. It was helpful that the tents really were white, and I let myself have a small color fix with a few pencil scribbles.