Holy Smoke! Intrepid Sketchers make their First Steps Into Visual Journaling, a 10x10 USK Workshop in Hazy Seattle

Saturday, August 25

Seattle wasn't its usual bustling self with sidewalks and parks full of locals and tourists enjoying the last weekend in August. Unhealthy air quality caused by smoke from wildfires burning in Canada and multiple states has taken its toll on all outdoor activities for the past few weeks. Air quality announcements advise people at risk to stay indoors. How would this work out for beginning students coming to my USK 10x10 First Steps Into Visual Journaling Workshop?

I handed out badges and pencils as my full class arrived. We loaded up on coffee, quiche and breakfast goodies from the Grand Central Bakery and pulled up our seats at the long wooden table inside the Arcade. I had planned for everyone to start the day with some quick warm up exercises. We covered materials, lettering, simple figures, how to use watercolor pencils and water brushes with or without pens, and more!

Warm up exercises and getting to know our materials

Many of my students were healthy enough to brave the unhealthy air for just a 10 minute dash out into the square for some first steps in sketching figures. They were practicing my patented 6-stroke method!

 
In my bag was a packet of handouts with illustrations on brick buildings and alleyways.

I had planned to go out onto the cobbled square with my students around noon for a demonstration and assignment but the air quality app I was using was in the orange zone; hazardous, limit outdoor activity, no strenuous exercise!

I stepped out of the big glass doors onto 1st Ave S. to check on the visibility and smoke factor for myself. As you can see, there was so much haze that things started fading out only a block or two away. There were so few people in this usually busy Seattle tourist area that you would never know that it was a summer weekend in August. Even Occidental Square had few people other than a food line provided by local charities for the homeless.

So it was on to plan "B". Just in case we were smoked out, I had a digital handout ready. I sent step by step instructions to everyone's smart phones illustrating how to take the first steps into drawing and painting cars. I call it Cars: Inside the box. I demonstrated each step. Carefully avoiding the "P" word (perspective) the approach is to draw and connect simple shapes. Everyone amazed themselves with their results. You can see how well they've done when you see the "throw down"  below.

I asked everyone to share their favorite sketches of the day on the old wood bench in the Arcade.

Intrepid new urban sketchers meeting the challenge safe inside the Grand Central Arcade

Thanks to my fantastic students and everyone at the Grand Central Building for accommodating the weather situation. I loved sharing some tips and techniques with this group and can't wait to see you at the next USk Seattle outing! You have what it takes to be an urban sketcher wherever you go! You took off smokin'!

Thanks also to Tina Koyama, who popped in to cover this event for Seattle Urban Sketchers blog.

Michele’s Visual Journaling

8/25/18 Michele demo-ing the 6-stroke figure inside Grand Central Arcade

Although Michele Cooper has taught First Steps in Visual Journaling several times, I’ve always managed to be out of town when it was offered. Yesterday I was finally able to catch up with her in Pioneer Square to sketch and photograph her popular USk 10x10 workshop in action. Known for her delightful sense of humor, Michele gently eased her students toward documenting their day’s activities with sketches and words.

The exercise I caught her demo-ing was her signature “6-stroke people” – like stick figures but with realistic human proportions – which she uses frequently to sketch people in the middle and far distance of an urban environment. Steering her students away from getting bogged down by facial or clothing details, she suggested that they “indicate, don’t illustrate.”

Michele showing some of her favorite sketching tools.

The smoky sky was back again, which kept her workshop mostly indoors. Undaunted, Michele showed her students that urban sketchers adapt to changing, unpredictable circumstances, and they made themselves at home inside Grand Central Arcade.

After eavesdropping on Michele and her students for a while, I became famished and decided I needed a sandwich from Grand Central Bakery. You know I rarely sketch my food: If I’m hungry enough to have it in front of me, I’m too hungry to sketch it. However, inspired by Michele’s montage style of visual journaling, I stopped myself from devouring the sandwich long enough to make the world’s fastest sketch. After scarfing it down, I looked around Grand Central Arcade to make a couple of small sketches next to the sandwich: Michele giving a demo and one of the ceiling lamps.

Before heading home, I walked out to Occidental Park to fill the rest of the page with some ping-pong players and a flower basket hanging from an iconic Pioneer Square lamp post. I guess the sandwich didn’t have to be quite so prominent on the page, but that’s what happens when I sketch hungry.

8/25/18 Inspired by Michele's montage style, here's my sandwich center stage surrounded by other elements of my day.

Some of Michele's students ventured outdoors to Occidental
Park to practice their 6-stroke figures.

Lively First Steps Lead to Fun-Filled Workshop

Michele Cooper’s quick wit and lively banter made her Seattle 10x10 workshop: First Steps in Visual Journaling a really fun way to spend Saturday morning. Grand Central Bakery Arcade again served as a perfect meeting place with indoor tables and relatively few early morning customers.

After sharing a few tips about sketching in public, collecting and using memorabilia, and selecting sketchbooks, Michele started with first things first—something everyone could feel comfortable with: letters. “Lettering can be expressive” according to Michele, it’s another opportunity to play and express yourself. She introduced 5 basic styles as seen below.

Next Michele reviewed different tools – pens, pencils, erasers, different sharpies, fountain pens, water brushes, showing how to use each one and allowing students to try out those that were new to them.

 

“Your sketchbook is your guilt-free zone; a place to play” Michele told students guiding them to select something simple as a second step. “Stay away from  the “P” word (perspective) to begin with. It complicates things too much.”

Michele demonstrated her “six steps to drawing people” using a water brush and crayon d’arche water colors- a simple yet effective way of  drawing people. 

Michele led everyone outside to have students choose items in the environment to create montage drawing. She reviewed the environment pointing out interesting architecture, signage and shapes. She also demonstrated drawing sky shapes to get the basic shapes of buildings in the surroundings.

A bit later, Michele demonstrated “thinking within the box” to draw a car. To wind up we pulled together four turquoise tables, laid down the sketchbooks while Michele pulled out scissors and glue sticks for students to use and gave tips on how to pull the pages together with lettering, memorabilia and color.

Winding up with a group photo at the end, the students, all smiles, laid down their drawings as evidence of what they has soaked in from the fun-filled morning.

And her's my summary of what I learned - simple objects, memoribilia, 6-step people and pulling it all together.  

Sketchin’ and Chillin’ with Andika

Andika shows us how he makes confident lines.
(Photo by Jane Wingfield)

“Sketch ‘n’ Chill,” the title of Andika Murandi’s USk Seattle 10x10 workshop, is irresistible: Who doesn’t enjoy sketchin’ and chillin’? And the subtitle is even better: “No-stress interior sketching.” I’ve long admired Andika’s sketches of interior spaces that convey depth and complexity and yet stay small and simple. His workshop would be a good opportunity to learn his approach. I signed up immediately!

For the first half of the workshop, we met in Pioneer Square’s Grand Central Arcade, where Andika led us through practicing the very basics of any kind of drawing: making bold, confident lines instead of jaggy, tentative ones. By moving the whole arm and shoulder, not just the wrist, even when drawing in a small sketchbook, lines will be more controlled, continuous and consistent. 

He urged us to forget about erasing tentative pencil lines; instead, he encouraged going straight in with ink and “embracing the mistake.” To reinforce this attitude, he showed us examples from his own sketchbook where he had made incorrect lines initially and then restated them, but left the old lines in place. When he pointed them out, we could see the “wrong” lines, but they otherwise disappeared into the rest of the composition, which was confidently presented.

Line-drawing practice

Rooms can be simplified into trapezoids, rectangles and triangles.

As an architect, Andika pays attention to perspective in his sketches, yet with a casual, “no stress” approach. Most traditional lessons in perspective drawing begin with illustrations of one-point or two-point perspective in which the point where all those lines meet might be way outside the composition and halfway down the street. Instead of starting with a horizon line and vanishing point, he showed us how interior spaces can be simplified into rectangles and trapezoids (one-point perspective) and triangles and trapezoids (two-point perspective). Once you see those basic shapes in a room and form a composition around them, the rest is just details. Stress-free perspective!

With those lessons and line exercises under our belts, we proceeded to our first sketch within the Arcade’s large interior. I chose the two-point perspective of one of the main doorways somewhat complicated by the stairwell in the center of the room. I initially got the height of the stairwell wall wrong, but I drew the lines confidently and left them boldly in place. 😉

4/21/18 Grand Central Arcade

True to his personal philosophy of relaxing with a beverage and sketchbook in a café, for the second exercise we split up into two groups, each going to a nearby coffee shop. I was in the Caffe Umbria group, and I went to a back corner of the café. I again chose a two-point perspective looking toward the front of the room. (I was planning to “chill” with a mocha as Andika would do, but learning to draw always makes me hungry! I sketch ‘n’ scarfed a grilled veggie sandwich.)

4/21/18 Caffe Umbria

Before taking this workshop, my usual approach would have been to focus first on the two men sitting in front of me, then add the roaster, tables, chairs and other details around the men, and finally fill in the windows and walls in the background. But often what happens is that my scale or placement is off on the tables and chairs, so when I put in the walls and windows behind them, the whole room tends to skew. With Andika’s approach, the first lines I made were the shapes of the trapezoids and triangles of the walls, ceiling and floor. Although I probably didn’t get the perspective perfectly accurate, when I used those lines to guide the placement and scale of the details, they tend to look right.

Similar to Gabi’s “Pocket Urban Sketching” concepts or Sue Heston’s “sky shapes,” both learned in last year’s 10x10 workshops and that I find myself using often, Andika’s simple, straightforward approach is one that I could grasp easily in an hour and then practice immediately for reinforcement. I left the workshop feeling confident that I could use his approach for interior spaces whenever I want to show the whole room – without thinking about where all those perspective lines eventually meet up. Sketch ‘n’ chill, indeed!

Final throwdown

A stress-free group! (Photo by Jane Wingfield)

Melancholy in Pioneer Square

12/30/16 Pioneer Square Christmas tree

You know Christmas is over when the large tree in Pioneer Square comes down. Meeting with Urban Sketchers Seattle for the last time of the year, feeling a bit wistful as I always do when I know the holiday season is coming to an end, I sketched the workers cutting off the branches and taking down the shiny ornaments.

On the other hand, I was thrilled to be able to sketch outdoors, however briefly. Although I didn’t paint it into my sketch, a large part of the sky was actually blue this morning!

After 20 minutes in 40 degrees, I retreated to the warmth and pastries of Grand Central Arcade. While I enjoyed sketching a silhouette of the main entrance and its beautiful arched windows, and while the cinnamon roll from Grand Central Bakery was as delicious as ever, I was again struck with some sadness about how the Arcade seemed dark, somber and empty. When I worked downtown decades ago, the Arcade was a favorite lunch break getaway (I already had my nostalgia fest the last time we sketched there), and it was full of interesting shops; its many tables were always crowded with people. Today there were more “for lease” signs than occupied spaces, and the homeless seemed to outnumber the employed (though not the sketchers).

12/30/16 Grand Central Arcade

Finally, my third reason for melancholy today was that we had to say good-bye to Ching, who is moving to the Bay Area. She’s been a very regular, enthusiastic urban sketcher the past seven months, and we’re all going to miss her.

We'll miss you, Ching (second from left, front row)!

Grand Central Arcade

10/30/15 Grand Central Arcade

Grand Central Bakery and its home in the historic Grand Central Arcade in Pioneer Square hold nostalgic memories for me. When I worked downtown in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I spent a lot of lunch hours and coffee breaks there. If I wanted to hide from co-workers, or a friend and I wanted a private conversation, the quiet, upper-level tables were good for that. If I needed a quick cup of coffee with no time to rest, I could breeze through and still enjoy the brick interior, the archways and those domed lights that I’ve always loved.

10/30/15

Today while the morning was still blustery, the Friday sketchers stayed in the cozy interior, but eventually the sun occasionally peeked out, and a few ventured outdoors. I was a bit torn – the sun was tempting – but the Grand Central’s unique interior captured my attention for more than one sketch.

10/30/15