Seeing the Bigger Picture with The Northwest School

7/12/16 ink, colored pencils

“At The Northwest School, students experience the exhilarating chemistry between academic disciplines and the arts. They learn to see the interdependence of all aspects of life in the real world. A bigger picture comes into focus. The school day becomes less about isolated subjects—and more about dynamic, interwoven concepts and ideas.”

Before today, the statement above was all I really knew about the Northwest School, because that’s the philosophy I read on its website. But this morning I got a brief look at what exactly that philosophy means – and wished that I had been exposed to such a philosophy when I was in grades 6 through 12!

David and Roham

The school and the Seattle Architecture Foundation invited Urban Sketchers Seattle to visit Lily Hotchkiss’s design/architecture-based art class to introduce the kids to urban sketching. In this summer session, the students are learning to design different elements through sketches and models. “I thought it would be great to start out by learning how to see buildings and sketch them,” Lily said. “I love Urban Sketchers and think this will be an exciting way to begin!”

David Chamness and I talked briefly to the five students, ages 10 through 15 and from several countries, in the classroom about our experiences sketching from life and showed them our sketchbooks and sketch kits. Then we all spent the rest of class time sketching in the area of Boren and Pine in the heart of downtown.

As I expected, the kids didn’t need us at all J – they all jumped into urban sketching with gusto. Engaged and enthusiastic, some were impressively aware of art, design and architecture in our urban world. Those bright young people will someday be our architects and urban planners – and hopefully urban sketchers, too. Like I said, I sure wish I’d had the Northwest School to attend when I was their age!

Instructor Lily Hotchkiss and two of her students

In true Urban Sketchers fashion, we all threw down our sketchbooks to share at the end of class!

Musical Hat in Georgetown

7/10/16 ink, watercolor, colored pencils

For the second year, Urban Sketchers Seattle took part in the Georgetown Garden Walk, an annual event that culminates with music and art in Oxbow Park. While I enjoy gardens as much as the next sketcher, I knew from last year that they would be crowded and difficult to sketch in, so today I went directly to the park instead. Like last year, I couldn’t resist another sketch of at least the hat part of the legendary and historic Hat ‘n’ Boots. Even better, a jazz band was performing under the hat (and unlike my lunchtime experience yesterday, this band was fantastic)!

In addition to us sketchers, lots of plein air painters also found Hat ‘n’ Boots to be an inspiring subject. I loved looking around the park and seeing sketchbooks and easels everywhere.

7/10/16 ink, colored pencils

Are They Still Tuning Up?

7/9/16 ink, colored pencils

When I go to farmers markets and other free venues to sketch buskers and other musicians, I don’t expect or need the music to be good; my entertainment comes from sketching them. That said, the jazz band that performed this noon at the Shoreline Farmers Market was probably the worst we have ever heard. As we ate our lunches from the food trucks, we kept asking each other, “Are they still tuning up? Or have they started?” They sounded like they had never played together before (and, we can only hope, will never again)!

Still, who am I to criticize? My entertainment comes from the sketching, and that part was still fun.

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!