Bake-off Interruption

8/3/25 7:20 p.m., Maple Leaf neighborhood

This sketch probably looks like many others I’ve made, with one exception: It was 7:20 p.m. on a Sunday evening. I had been quietly enjoying The Great British Baking Show after dinner as I occasionally do, when suddenly the floor started shaking and the windows vibrating from jackhammering on the street. Although it hadn’t rained in weeks, a small river was forming on the pavement in front of the house a few doors down.

After I made this hasty sketch from my front porch, I went down to ask a worker what was going on: a broken water main. “Happens all the time,” he informed me, gesturing toward “these old pipes are everywhere.” In response to my remark of consternation, he said, grinning, “One of these days it’ll be your house.”

I thanked him for his reassurance and went back to my no-longer-quiet Sunday evening.

Flowers, Music and Peach Pie

 

8/2/25 Art in the Garden at the Ballard P-Patch

Art in the Garden, the Ballard P-Patch’s annual neighborhood fair, hasn’t always been on my radar, but after last year’s fun, I have decided to keep it on my summer calendar. Now in its 23^rd year, the event offers arts and crafts vendors, live music, a barbecue, beer garden, and a walk through the community garden’s lovely blooms and produce.

I was surprised to find myself sketching the Sølje Sisters again – I had just sketched them at Phinney Farmers Market a couple of weeks ago. And then I wasn’t surprised: I learned that the violinist shown second from left is a gardener at the P-Patch.

Now an annual tradition!

Colorful flowers, art vendors, music – plenty of reasons to enjoy Art in the Garden. But let’s be honest: I was there for the peach pie (and since I’ve done it for two consecutive years, it’s now an annual tradition).

Fresh and Familiar Faces at Drink & Draw

 

8/1/25 Old Stove Brewing Co., Ballard neighborhood

We enjoyed last month’s drink & draw at Old Stove Brewing Company so much that USk Seattle went back on Friday. First timer Jovel was happy to meet and chat with a few folks over brews and sketchbooks before she eventually joins us at a regular meetup. The extreme introvert in me is always surprised that a newcomer would choose to first approach a group at a purely social gathering like drink & draw, which would be really hard for me, rather than at a sketch outing, where I could easily retreat to my sketch (without necessarily having to talk to anyone). But I’m pleased that others are more comfortable joining a group in the casual, familiar setting of a brew pub; it happens at almost every drink & draw. As an admin, I think whatever we can offer to make USk more approachable is a good thing.

When I sketch across a spread like this, I try to avoid letting the gutter run through something important like a face -- ouch. 

As for me, I’m always comfortable at USk drink & draws now. Even if I don’t know someone, by the end of the evening, we have probably sketched each other, and there’s no better way to break the ice than to laugh over sketch-mate portraits.

Gouache: Mind Blown Backward and Inside-Out

 

7/30/25 Elliott Bay beach (gouache in Stillman & Birn Delta sketchbook)

After taking several colored pencil workshops with Sarah Bixler to learn her fascinating take on color temperature, I got brave and plunged into a totally new medium: gouache!

Sarah's workshop met at a strip of beach on Elliott Bay, where
I learned to balance my palette, sketchbook, water cup, and butt on a handy
but uncomfortable log. Only the five paints in my CMYK set are in the palette
(the rest are watercolors).

Oh, sure, I’ve dipped into pink gouache during cherry blossom season, and we’ve all used touches of white gouache for snow or highlights. But making an entire, full-on painting with nothing but gouache was completely new territory for me. And because I prefer to plunge into the deep end before sticking my toe in the water, I took Sarah’s plein air workshop so that I could struggle with all the usual challenges of being on location (on this day, it was heat, humidity and sitting on a log) while also learning a new medium. Yay for tough art love!

A color-mixing study in which we make an arrangement of 
squares and rectangles indicating the percentage of a
particular hue we might use in the composition. Without
trying to make the actual composition, we can see how the hues
might play against each other.

Although I’m certainly no pro at watercolors, I’ve used them enough to know that gouache is basically the opposite in every way. They both squeeze out of tubes to make you think they are similar, but their similarities end there. When watercolors are glazed, their transparency allows the previous colors to show through, resulting in optical mixing. Colored pencils, too, are transparent like watercolors, so I’m used to that kind of layering.

By contrast, gouache is opaque, so succeeding layers completely obscure whatever was underneath (definitely a benefit in many cases, but difficult to wrap my head around). Instead of saving out the white of the paper for the brightest highlights with watercolor, with gouache, you can simply paint the white on last!

The biggest head explosion (or implosion, perhaps, given the backwardness of my perception), however, was in the way shifting values can be achieved: If I’m using a watercolor that turns out to be more vibrant or darker than I want, the simplest way to lighten the hue is to dilute it with more water. With gouache, you don’t add water – you add white! Whaaat!!

Sarah at her demo easel and some classmates.

Even though I understood this in concept, it still took me many (perhaps habitual) dips into the water cup before I learned to dip into the white instead. Once I did, though, what a game changer! I found it much easier to shift the value of a hue one way or the other with the simple addition of white or the hue (or occasionally black). Although Sarah had given us a supply list with a fairly typical palette of basic colors, I chose to bring only five paints to the workshop: the cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white that came in the Holbein primary mixing set I had purchased a couple of years ago. With only the three CMY primaries plus white and black made the job of shifting hues and values much easier than with a full palette.

My painting is a bit of a mess, especially the pile of rocks in the foreground, but as a first painting in a new medium, I’d say it’s not a bad start. I was pleased by the range of muted hues I was able to mix with that basic CMY triad (it helped that I was already familiar with using the CMY triad with colored pencils). The result looks more cohesive than I would probably otherwise achieve.

Elliott Bay beach just below Olympic Sculpture Park

My biggest frustration was how much time it takes to mix the hues and values I’m looking for. Gouache dries so quickly, especially on a hot day, that I was constantly fighting with making the paint fluid enough to apply without adding so much water as to dilute the opacity. As with any wet medium, learning how to hit the right ratio of water to paint is critical to mastering gouache.

But never mind mastery. Sarah’s workshop has whetted my appetite, and I’m looking forward to more stumbling and fumbling with gouache. I might even concede that some studio practice would be helpful before I go full-on urban sketching with gouache.

Unauthorized at the Sculpture Park

7/30/25 Calder's Eagle from inside Paccar Pavilion, Olympic Sculpture Park

I knew it had been a while since I had last sketched at the Olympic Sculpture Park, but I was surprised to find that it was as many as three years ago. Arriving there a bit early for a workshop (more on that tomorrow), I had time for a few quick sketches. (I made a mental note to come back sometime soon so I could spend more time there.)

On that hot, late afternoon, I had initially ducked into the comfy AC of Paccar Pavilion, Seattle Art Museum’s indoor facility at the sculpture park, which has a view of Calder’s Eagle. Shortly after I had begun the sketch, a security guard, surprised to see me, informed me that the pavilion had closed 15 minutes earlier. When I explained that I had entered because the door was unlocked (pointing to the door), he muttered something (which I took to mean that he was supposed to have locked it but hadn’t). Oopsy.

Fortunately, the outdoor part of the park stays open until dusk.

After I got kicked out, I sketched Ellsworth Kelly's Curve XXIV at the Pavilion's entrance.

Rukus (with Pet Portraiture Tips)

 

7/30/25 Rukus (reference photo by Katelyn This)

Bright-eyed Rukus is in the same family as Jett and Maggie. Something tells me that this little guy is a handful (perhaps his name is a clue)!

I’ve often talked about the many things I’ve learned from my long and now-large series of pet portraits (nearly a hundred are in my Flickr album). I’m probably repeating some thoughts here, but I wanted to list what I have found to be some of the most important characteristics of realistic pet portraiture. If you feel like drawing pets, maybe some of these tips will be helpful.

• I can’t stress this enough: Get a well-lighted, in-focus reference photo. It often helps to have multiple images of the animal from different angles, in case some information is unclear in your primary reference.
  
  
• The eyes are critical. Humans and their pets (maybe especially dogs) spend a lot of time making eye contact, so the eyes have to be right, or the human won’t feel the connection. I spend more time on the eyes than I do on any other feature or all that fur.
   
• As in portrait photography, a super-important part of the eyes is the catchlight. If the
  
  reference photo doesn’t have one, I will fake it – it’s that important in conveying life in the eyes.
  
  
• I can’t remember whose class it was (maybe Gary Faigin’s) or which book I read, but here’s a tip about drawing eyes (human, but it applies to animals, too) that has stayed with me: The upper eyelid always makes a subtle shadow on the top of the eyeball. A good reference photo will show this, and if you learn to look for it, you will observe it, even if it’s subtle. The tip I learned said that beginner portrait artists will often draw the eye as if the entire iris is visible, but it is almost always partially obscured by that shadow. If you nail that, the eyes will look more realistic.
  
  
• With dogs, almost as important as the catchlight are the subtle reflections on the lower edge of the nostrils. It’s not a bright highlight, as the nose is not shiny, but it is always moist, which creates the reflection.
  
  
• Here’s a helpful dog tip I learned from Sketching Scottie: In life-drawing classes and books, we always learn that the average human face has about one eye width between our eyes. In dogs, the space is two eye widths. I measure every time, and it’s true! Well, as in human anatomy, it’s a general guideline, not a universal rule. I’m working on a dog portrait now whose eyes are much farther apart than two eye widths. And the face must be straight head-on like Rukus is here, with no angle, to measure it accurately. But it is helpful to understand basic anatomical structures.

Naturally Occurring Still Lives

7/9/25

 A still life is typically an arrangement of objects that an artist designs in the studio for the purpose of drawing or painting. The objects are optimally lighted from just the right angle so that their form and cast shadows are part of the design.

(This post isn’t about the difference between a still life and an urban sketch, but as a diehard urban sketching evangelist, I can’t help but make this point: Since a still life is made from direct observation, some sketchers draw a vase of flowers on their kitchen table and call that an urban sketch. I would argue that anything you set up yourself for the deliberate purpose of drawing is not urban sketching because there’s no story or context there other than the exercise of drawing. End of sermon.)

7/27/25 

The only times I’ve ever worked from a studio still life were in classes or at home as class homework. The best example is from Terry Furchgott’s class years ago. Although I appreciated learning about rendering form from these exercises, I was relieved that the instructor had done the work for us. For each student, she arranged a unique still life inside a box that was open on only one side. The arrangement was lighted with a single light source to minimize confusing shadows. Although it was an ideal setup for understanding and practicing values and forms, I’m too lazy to do all that for myself.

Shown here are some sketches I’ve made on the patios at Aegis Living. Although these might be legitimate urban sketches, I think of them more as naturally occurring still lives. I don’t arrange anything or even move a chair (though the temptation is sometimes there); I simply look around for compositions. (This is my personal philosophical argument, not a “rule” of urban sketching, but I believe that as soon as I move a chair to improve the composition, I am making a still life, not an urban sketch.)

7/29/25 

An important part of these “designs” are the cast shadows, which I find especially interesting when the sources of the shadows are not part of the composition (as in the one at left).

These naturally occurring still lives are a fun challenge that also appeal to my naturally lazy nature.