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.

Fun and Frustration

6/30/16 inks, brush pen, colored pencils

The Seattle Art Museum’s latest exhibit is Graphic Masters, an unusual collection of prints and pen and ink drawings by Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, Picasso and R. Crumb. It was very enjoyable and illuminating to see engravings and other prints by Dürer and Rembrandt that I had only seen in books, and most of the others I had never seen before. Many of the engravings were surprisingly small – maybe no bigger than my sketchbook – and magnifying glasses were available to view the intricate details. Even though seeing prints in books is not the same as seeing the originals, at least they are often enlarged when reproduced. I left the exhibit with a greater appreciation for all of the works.

As a sketching opportunity, however, the exhibit was less inspiring; lots and lots of small prints on white walls didn’t exactly grab me. But as long as I was downtown, I made several small sketches of things I saw to and from the museum – the huge Hammering Man kinetic sculpture outside SAM; the small animal heads adorning a building’s planters; people on the bus.

6/30/16 Neopiko Deleter brush pen, Gelly Roll pen

My last sketch before hopping on the bus for home was the street scene at Third Avenue and University. Whenever I see layers and layers of urban buildings plus vehicles, people, street signs, trees and other “street furniture,” I get really overwhelmed and can’t put the elements together into a composition. I’m not at all happy with the sketch above, and it was frustrating after all the fun I had sketching the earlier isolated elements. But I know the only way I’ll get better at doing busy street scenes is to do more of them. 

6/30/16 Neopiko Deleter brush pen

6/30/16 Kuretake brush pen, Gelly Roll pen

6/30/16 Neopiko Deleter brush pen

Three Tones at Green Lake

6/29/16 ink, brush pen, colored pencil,
gel pen, grease pencil

One of the many things I’ve learned from using Field Notes as sketchbooks is that red is the new tan. Saturated red paper seems unlikely as a sketching paper, but when I can use only three tones – black, white and the red paper as the middle tone – everything is simplified. Although I’d tried it at various times, traditional tan or gray toned paper hasn’t interested me much – until I started sketching in red Field Notes. And then I started to see what toned paper could teach me.

Green Lake Park is very familiar territory for me, and I almost always use color when I sketch there, trying to differentiate the various shades of green in all the trees, their shadows, the grass and everything else. Yesterday I worked hard to simplify a lamp post, a bench and some trees to the three basic tones. I wanted to retain some of the different textures, however, so I used both a white pencil and a white gel pen, and a black brush pen as well as a black grease pencil. I found myself squinting a lot to see and simplify the tones, and I tried not to worry about differentiating between a thing and its shadow if the tone was the same. It’s hard to do because my brain knows the difference, and I have to ignore it.

My 104 Seconds of Fame

6/15/16 brush pen, Gelly Roll

My red Field Notes sketches were mentioned on the Erasable podcast June 15! (OK, so I’m easily thrilled, but it’s still an honor to be recognized by the stationery community where I spend so much of my online time!) Hosts and pencil gurus Johnny Gamber and Andy Welfle and their guest host Ana Reinert (whose blog, The Well-Appointed Desk, is one of my favorites) were discussing the Sweet Tooth edition, and they thought of me. Give it a listen, especially around 29:40.

6/27/16 brush pen, Gelly Roll

6/17/16 brush pen, Gelly Roll, white colored pencil

6/3/16 brush pen, Gelly Roll

Happy 7th Anniversary, USk Seattle!

6/26/16 inks, watercolor, Zig marker, water-soluble
colored pencils

Just a couple of weeks shy of our seventh anniversary, Urban Sketchers Seattle met this morning at Fishermen’s Terminal, the site of the group’s very first sketch outing in 2009. I, myself, would not join USk for another three years, but in many ways I feel like I’ve been part of it all along, watching it grow in both members and enthusiasm.

Starting up shortly after Gabi Campanario founded our international parent group Urban Sketchers, USk Seattle was one of the first regional chapters to form. We’ve been meeting on monthly Sundays ever since, and in 2012 we began meeting additionally twice a month on Fridays.

Last year at the terminal, I focused on the boats, but it had been a couple of years since I sketched the Seattle Fishermen’s Memorial, a tribute to the people who have died at sea as part of the region’s fishing industry. With that in mind, I remembered to bring along my Field Notes Byline reporter’s notebook, whose long, skinny format is just right for tall, skinny memorials. In the small red Field Notes is a detail of one of the many fish at the foot of the sculpture.

6/26/16 inks, colored pencils

6/26/16 brush pen, white Gelly Roll

As I walked along the pier, thinking I would sketch one of the gazillions of boats, what should I find? One of my favorite subjects, a bright yellow crane! And just beneath it was Frank Ching, whom I knew wouldn’t be there for too long, so I sketched him first (top of page).

On this sunny morning when it felt like summer had finally returned again (after three weeks of a wet and chilly June-uary), we were out at Fishermen’s Terminal in nearly record-breaking numbers – someone counted 38! (I think our record is nearly 50 on an equally beautiful day at Pike Place Market a couple of summers ago.) Happy seventh anniversary, USk Seattle! I’m proud and honored to be a member!

Photo by Kate Buike