Eleanor Doughty Sketches from Afar

10/20/18 Ellie gives a demo at tiny Lynn Street Mini Park.

On a chilly, foggy morning, I went out to what must be Seattle’s tiniest park ever: Lynn Street Mini Park on the east shore of Lake Union. That was the location of Ellie Doughty’s USk 10x10 workshop, From Afar: Rendering Atmospheric Perspective in Watercolor. Stopping by for a quick sketch and a few photos, I couldn’t take the workshop myself, but from all reports, it was an inspiring, well-organized experience for her students. And she couldn’t have picked a better day to focus on atmospheric perspective: Boats and buildings on the near shore were in marked contrast to the foggy landscape on the opposite side of the lake.

A great morning for atmospheric perspective.

RIP Twin Victorians

When I ride my bike home from Capitol Hill, I always pass these dilapidated Victorians tucked on the very end of a street ending at the I-5 cut cliff. I thought they were the same, but when I started drawing them I realized they were quite different from each other - still twins, just not identical. I sketched them in April. Each time I passed by after that, I noticed slight changes to the houses – new tags, more windows boarded up or broken.

Someone on Etsy bought a print of this, and let me know that she used to live on the second floor of the one on the right & sent me a photo of her former living room. She had this to say about it:

"it was a pretty cool house, pretty dumpy but it had lots of charm. It was built in the 1890s and it was one of the first houses built on that side of capitol hill. (They didn't even have roads back then, just horse trails!) The houses were converted to triplexes, and I rented the middle unit from a older lady who had inherited the property from her family. She recently died, and I think her daughter sold it to developers. All of the tenants were evicted last November so they can tear it down to build a 40-unit building."

process pic - watercolor over loose graphite sketch

Well, you can probably guess where this is going. When I biked past this spot last night, there's nothing there - the houses are gone. Demolished at some point in the last two months. Apparently some squatters started a fire in the right side house, which sped up the process. I'm sure yet another boxy ~modern~ apartment building will be shortly erected in their place.

But thanks to sketching, I won't forget what was there before. I can only imagine how the view out of those bay windows changed over the 120 years they stood on Capitol Hill, looking over South Lake Union. They predated roads on this part of the neighborhood! I mean, the city itself hasn't been around much longer than these houses were.

Taichung Nights

As some of you know, I attended the AsiaLink Sketchwalk event in Taichung, Taiwan (kind of like a smaller USk symposium focusing on Asia), a nice finish to 50+ days of travel sketching. I stayed a few days after the event ended on October 7th, hoping to explore/sketch the city more with visiting sketchers (since we really didn't make it out of the central district)...but pretty much everyone else left either for home or Taipei by the next day. Oh well...I'm used to traveling alone.

And I really liked Taichung – moreso than Taipei, actually - so I didn't want to leave, either. Maybe because the weather is better? Or because I met so many nice people there? It didn't look much different from Taipei but my experiences were overall better.

I went to about 10 different night markets in Taiwan, and each one was unique in terms of its vibe,  gastronomical offerings, and layout. But always the lights were bright, the crowds lively, the food cheap and delicious. 

These mixed-media drawings are from my pocket sketchbook, which I bound myself with colored cardstock paper  - made for quick and dirty drawings. I was playing with capturing the light/dark values of these night scenes quickly, as well as the impressions of life in the market. I used Posca markers for the large yellow/pink marks, and a variety of media (correction fluid, brush pen, markers,  etc) for the rest.

Zhongxiao Night Market - sketched while eating tempura fried carrots on a sidewalk. A giant Daruma beckons you inside for fresh seafood.

 Not actually a night market (or at night) but this shop, Chun Shui Tang, claims to be the origin of bubble tea. The food AND drinks were really great. One of the few hyped up restaurants I went to on my travels where my expectations were not only met but exceeded!

Fengchia Night Market main road - the biggest market in Taichung! Sketched this while waiting in line for takoyaki. It was a long but fast moving queue - usually I just stood in line for what had the longest line out front and it was usually a pretty good strategy.

Back page: lady waiting on scooter, and collection of stamps from the Taipei metro. Each station has its own souvenir stamp!! The colors of ink correspond to the train lines - it was super exciting to go into a new station to see what the stamp was. Stamping culture is really big in Taiwan and I am right there with them.

dispatch from Japan: Shimanami Kaido

I’ve been traveling solo in Asia since the end of August and it’s been amazing. I have so many sketches to share with you, but I’ll start with a small but particularly great part of my journey: biking the Shimanami Kaido cycling route in Hiroshima prefecture in Japan. It’s a 70km / ~45 mile cycling path crossing through 6 islands in the Seto Inland Sea. 

I started in Onomichi and went south, and the bridges spanning across the water got longer and more stunning each time. I was struck by how similar the landscape looked to the Puget Sound (a Japanese Seattlite I met there agreed with me). I wish we could have such a nice bike path in the San Juans - or please advise me if it exists already! The route was so easy to navigate, you just had to follow a blue line painted on the side of the road, and all the hills up to the bridges were graded so it was a very accessible ride for all levels. I saw hardcore cycling groups decked out in spandex, as well as people in day clothes casually riding.

The weather wasn’t the best for plein air, but I managed to fit in several sketches during the 3 days I took to explore the area. I feel like I just skimmed the surface here, even though I ended up biking 200 km (125 miles)!

 

The bridge between Innoshima and Ikuchi Islands. This was maybe 1.5 hours of cycling from Onomichi, so I had a snack and sat on a retaining wall. I liked the contrast of the town cluster below the bridge, and the distant island hills. 

Takara Bridge: this is maybe the most famous one, or at least the one I knew from watching anime. I wanted to show how BIG it is! There were rain clouds looming, so I was going fast with the knowledge I might have to stop at any moment. These islands grow a lot of citrus, so I drank some fresh local orange juice as I painted this, and made sure to include the distant orchards on the farther island. 

Ōshima Bridge: I stayed on this island for 3 nights, so I definitely have a soft spot for this view. Ōshima Island’s main industry is a granite quarry, so I watched boats leaving the stone yards as I sketched, as well as men fishing off the docks in the early morning. The small neighborhood shown here was really charming, with lots of old wooden Japanese houses clustered at the water’s edge. 

Takara Bridge, take 2: I wasn’t that happy with my first painting of this scene, so I found an observatory above the bridge to do a really fast sketch on my way back to Onomichi. it was raining a lot this day, and I needed to catch a ferry a few islands away, so I timed myself to finish in 25 minutes. You can see where it rained on my ink lines.
I was pretty happy with this one because the fast drawing has a lot of energy! But I still think it doesn’t show the scale of the bridge that well…it’s SO big, and really exhilarating to cycle on! 

I’d love to come back to these islands for even longer - you could easily spend a whole month in this area. There are many “island explorer” bike trails branching off the main Shimanami Kaido route with small charming towns and clean, empty beaches. I was constantly torn between wanting to stop to sketch and document where I was, and wanting to continue to see what was ahead.

From Afar: an atmospheric perspective workshop

Hey Seattle USkers, I wanted to let y'all know I'll be teaching a workshop in the fall 10x10 series, From Afar (Oct. 20 in Eastlake). I'll be teaching some methods on making your compositions have greater contrast between close & distant objects in interesting and fun ways, using principles of atmospheric perspective. Although the workshop is not for beginners, it's pretty approachable as long as you have some grasp of watercolor techniques (i.e. it's not your first time ever picking up the medium). 

The subject matter will be Queen Anne hill & Westlake as seen from the Eastlake neighborhood. I love capturing the trees and buildings stacked up on the hill, topped by the 3 antennas I never get tired of it. The techniques can certainly be applied outside of Queen Anne views though! And since it'll be in October, we might even get some stunning fall foliage. I hope you can make it to my first official Urban Sketchers workshop, I'm very excited. 

Here are some sketches which show some examples of these techniques - to me, the typical Seattle landscape is a hill with buildings peeking through trees, and I love painting these kinds of scenes. 

emphasis zone

In a beautiful city like Seattle, I've surprised myself by being so attracted sketching the highway of all things, but here we are. Mercer Corridor along I-5 is an area designated as one of Seattle's "emphasis zones" – which are "places where an encampment has become a consistent problem". It's also very close to where I live. These paintings contrast the traffic, chaos, and sale of the freeway with the people who live their lives around the structures. It might be hard to see at the small scale here but there are tiny people in the landscapes if you look for them. 

I sketched all three of these from life while standing above I-5, drawing as fast as I could so as to minimize the amount of fumes I breathe.

These + a few more paintings will be on display for one night only - Thursday 7/19/18, 7pm-2am - at Lovecitylove in Capitol Hill!

from Pine St.

under Lakeview Blvd

from Plymouth Pillars Park

Post Alley

On a hot day, I made a detour after errands to swing through Pike Place Market and got totally sucked into the very charming Post Alley.



I sat across from one of the entrances by the market to do a quick sketch capturing the strong summer shadows. I liked the intersection of the produce vendor stalls with the multi-level cafe seating.




Then I walked up through the alley and found a spot in a public seating area with a nice view of the sign! The colors in this sketch were inspired by the outfit of a lady I saw walking through nearby - the combo of cerulean/purple/yellow was quite striking.

Chinese Garden + Patrick's Cafe

I was glad to have the chance to go across town to meet up with the urban sketchers in the Chinese Garden recently. Definitely worth the bus trip across the city to a place I probably wouldn't have the occasion to visit otherwise! It was a very serene morning sketching with everyone in the courtyard of this beautiful building. I really liked the layers of rooftop on this structure, and chose a spot where the upward angle would be exaggerated. Since I arrived late I didn't do any pencil sketching, just went into it with paint...which ended up kind of confusing myself in the long run, since there are so many layers of wood and decorative flourishes.


Sue kindly gave me a ride to Patrick's Cafe & Bakery down the road, and I was so glad I went with the group to lunch this time. The conversation was fun, the food and coffee were GREAT, and I enjoyed sketching Patrick's new digs. The building is truly quintessential Seattle architecture. Normally I'd do a building portrait from much farther away from a more traditional angle, but I decided to challenge myself and draw a super wide view from up close, which turned out to be pretty darn fun.



Patrick was so nice to us that I really wanted to give him a sketch in return for his generous hosting, and also because I knew he'd be super psyched about a drawing of his new cafe space. Unsurprisingly he was pretty happy about receiving this one, and traded me a bag of his Lilikoi lemon shortbread cookies which are ~delicious~. Hopefully the universe will provide us more opportunities to trade art for good food and hospitality!

throwback: La Paz, Bolivia

I've been too busy to sketch in the amazing weather we've had in Seattle lately, so I wanted to share some drawings I made last year on a trip around Bolivia and Chile. This post is about La Paz, Bolivia, the most visually interesting of the big cities we went to; its topography is extreme.=!

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March 2017

After a tedious 3 flights from southern Chile, we landed in La Paz super early one Monday morning and caught a couple Zs in the airport lobby until the sun rose. Our Airbnb was deep in the valley of La Paz, while the airport is on the high plain, El Alto, above the city; the taxi drive down the scary-steep canyon roads was stunning and terrifying. The city is characterized by its elevation: at over 2 miles above sea level, many visitors get sick from the altitude, but for some reason it wasn't bad for us (I had more trouble acclimating in Denver, a mile above sea level). 

 It’s convenient to take in the stunning landscape of this city from their new public transit system of Teleféricos, or cable cars. Seattle Metro really could learn a thing or two from this place; I feel like it makes much more sense to have aerial transit when your city is so hilly – less rock to drill through.

My travel partner & artist friend Emily and I got up around sunrise every day to sketch/paint from our home base: a penthouse in the middle of La Paz, with several balconies looking out over the valley (your US $ goes really far in Bolivia, it wasn't even that much of a splurge to rent such a nice place). One day I took the opportunity to borrow some of her gouache supply for a study of the block below from our balcony. 

A typical landscape in La Paz: the rim of the canyon, cliffs, masses of aesthetically identical brick box-like houses (many without glass in the windows). On this day the clouds were especially epic. 
In the bottom right of this photo you can see part of the big Cementerio General in the middle of the city, which I think is an amazing design for an urban place. much more practical than our typical grassy sprawling lawns, arguably a waste of space in a densely populated city.

Rain usually accompanies the early-day cloud cover, so on another morning I stayed inside to draw – still with an amazing view. In La Paz, the wealthiest residents choose to live as low in elevation as possible, apparently to take advantage of milder weather. Interestingly, most other cities I’m aware of have the opposite tendency. We were in the more upscale central valley, which takes advantage of the surrounding canyon walls - shielding its residents from the high winds of the plains. 

Diesel Nacional: one of the coolest bar interiors I’ve ever been in – it has a very industrial and grungy vibe, a very particular aesthetic unlike anything I've seen. The fixtures were all custom  metalwork, even in the bathrooms!, with brass instruments hanging from chains from the ceiling. Highly recommend visiting if you’re in La Paz.

Olympic Peninsula

Continuing from my previous post, here are some sketches I made during some of our day trips out away from Port Angeles. Most of these were also made very quickly onsite and finished up at home. Not everyone in our group had the patience for hanging around, understandably. I'm definitely going to make a trip back to some of these areas with friends who have a similar slow pace to match my own.

Like the painting at the top, this one is set at Rialto Beach. Of the Olympic beaches I've been to so far, this one was not my favorite, although it certainly was very beautiful. We got up super early to drive here to catch the low tide so we could check out whatever creatures were hanging out in the tide pools. This sketchbook painting was done while waiting for the first piece to dry – working on something else simultaneously helps me avoid impatiently messing with a damp painting. Often I end up liking the more spontaneous one more.

 Bogachiel Rain Forest - I drew this one super fast (like 10 or 15 minutes!) and put color on top later. The "nurse logs" of these forests stood out to me this time - when an old tree dies, new ones tend to grow directly on top of it, as you can see happening in the mossy stump in this sketch. It's really tough to capture the lushness and different species of plants intermingling in this environment, as well as capturing the feeling of being deep inside an ancient forest.

Trying to convey lushness through sketching is a tough job. It seems like you really have to draw every detail if you want it all to come through as it is in real life...but that's too much work. so I'm trying to develop shortcuts to visually communicate this, such as drawing in small pockets of detail, and punching out light areas by filling in the shadows.

Port Angeles, WA

Views from a Safeway parking lot, while everyone was grocery shopping.
Since they could return at any minute I went small + fast! 

Recently, my partner's folks came over from the east coast & Colorado to spend some time with us in the Seattle area. We spent 5 days exploring the Olympic Peninsula, with our home base in Port Angeles - specifically, partway up the slope of Mount Angeles, where the small-town feel gives way to barns and woods. 

While I enjoyed my time in Port Angeles – the natural beauty and a lot of the older houses are really nice to look at – the overall impression I got was pretty guarded and even foreboding. Who knows what's behind the trunks of the towering conifers in that darkness? (I was thinking about vampires because we went through Forks earlier)

On one afternoon, my partner & I walked over a mile down the mountain to find this very cute/abandoned(?) moss-roofed house we kept passing in the car on the way to the base. Although it wasn't a busy road, there were no sidewalks and no shoulder, and everytime a car passed us we felt so out of place...like we shouldn't be walking there; we should be driving. Then when we finally arrived at this house, which was in a more suburban area, it felt very weird and awkward to sketch. Some neighbor guy even came out to ask what we were doing; he apparently thought we were casing it to steal their stuff. I wish we asked him what was up with this house, it was quite dilapidated. Most of the painting on this one was done later, as we didn't want to stick around.

On another day, we were able to spend some time down by the water on the Strait of San Juan, near where the Victoria ferry comes in. So many great views, especially on such a clear day like this, where you can clearly see Canadian mountains. I was drawn to the clearly defined horizontal layers of this pier scene.

A final quick painting in my sketchbook, turned 180 degrees from the previous painting. The mountains rising up behind the house-topped hills of Port Angeles are so stunning. This was a rare, perfectly clear day; usually the peaks are obscured by clouds.

PDX Trip

A few weeks back, I went to Portland for a few days — it's the first overnight trip I've taken away from the city in 2018. My partner and I were there to celebrate & hang with a dear friend for her birthday, and took a few days to explore the city, obviously sketching as much as possible. We were lucky to catch some genuinely Spring-y weather while in Oregon. It's not my first time in PDX, but it is my first time there after moving to the west coast. It really feels a lot like Seattle, especially architecturally — I definitely prefer our city, but PDX seems to have a better food scene (y'all can try to prove me wrong on this).

Yam Hill Food Cart Pod | After our bus dropped us off in downtown Portland, and once the sudden rainfalls abated, we did some sketching by a food cart pod. A really great use of a parking lot in a dense urban area. I would totally get lunch at every cart once if I worked nearby; your stomach could travel the world in this one block.

St. Johns Bridge | A lovely suspension bridge (in my opinion, not shared by my PDX host) from a lview we stopped to capture after hiking in Forest Park. Portland's hills are taller than Seattle's, but their mountains are much less dramatic (still very beautiful, just different!). The area across the river is super industrial, which I may have slightly edited away in this painting. St Johns was an important stop along the river during the lumber boom.

 

Willamette Boulevard | On the way back from Forest Park hiking & St. Johns, we passed this huge old Victorian house which i LOVED. So later, we came back here and I spent an hour or so sitting on the side of a busy road painting while sitting in the dirt. What else could you want on a vacation?

Paul Bunyan | As we were staying in the adorable Kenton neighborhood, we apparently had to check out this local landmark standing on a busy intersection. I appreciate the wonkyness of giant Paul at this intersection but his unfocused gaze and lack of neck definitely adds some uncanny aspects to this monumental sculpture. But yeah let's #keepportlandweird!

Tom McCall Waterfront Park | This was the first day all year that it felt like Real Spring (i.e. warm enough to sketch for a couple hours without my hands freezing) and Portland residents were out in force at this stretch of waterfront lawn. The cherry blossoms were also at peak bloom! It was a shame to have to leave to catch our train back to Seattle.