MOHAI sketches and pre-game jitters

It is always a challenge at a crowded sketch crawl to find a comfortable quiet corner to center myself!  I found a place to sit at the window in the sketching room of the exhibit "Drawn to Seattle" (listening to a subtle sound track of croaking frogs somewhere).  I chose this view looking west over Lake Union but wanted to include the identifiable MOHAI banner in my sketch.

My first sketch started with an error (like the Seahawk fumble early first quarter)...I had placed the banner too low on my page...and I would only have the foggy hillside in my sketch..oops!

 

So I started over and took on the challenge of sketching the buildings on the hillside shrouded in fog.  I sketched in part of the sailboat with green sail covers at the bottom of my page.  I added the construction tower crane which was actually much further to the left of this view.  The crane added a necessary urban element to this setting, however all the other tower cranes in this South Lake Union vicinity were flying Seahawk 12th Man flags..(was this a bad omen?).  But I discovered too late that the detail of the sailboat was lost at the bottom of my sketch and would require some modifications in the "second half".

So after the crawl ended and well after the exciting win by the Seahawks, I tackled the sketch revision once more.  I darkened the water reflections by the pier pilings to highlight the foreground and painted out the sail covers  This contrasted better with the fading colors of the buildings as the hillside disappeared up into the fog.