Day at the Viaduct

This ramp at Seneca seemed to illustrate how negatively this structure has impacted our waterfront and the cool buildings in the neighborhood. 

Absolut (?) Hot Dog Stand - Pioneer Square Seattle

After the Seattle Urban Sketchers Gathering on the Seattle Waterfront - I walked south to Pioneer Square where there is a new (newer) food stand near the pergola and the Chief Sealth statue. Every half an hour of so I would have to take a break while all the people doing the Underground Seattle tour stood in front of me listening to their guide go over the story of the great Seattle fire of June 6, 1889.

August Sketch Outing - Under the viaduct, Seattle Waterfront

Join us for the August Sketch Outing

Sunday, August 18: Under the viaduct, Seattle waterfront

10:00 am to 12:30 

Meet at the Starbucks on Alaskan Way and Spring (map)

10:00 a.m. 

Nibble on Dibble Blockparty

I wanted to really document our annual blockparty
to get a good feel of what it was like.   The party
has been going on for the last 23 years.  The signature
feature is the 40' tall waterslide that is erected on Friday
and dismantled on Sunday.  The street is closed for two
days and everyone contributes to a great time.
The sandwich, I confess is a figment of my imagination
but all of the ingredients occur at the event.

Urban Sketchers Celebrates Edmonds! is underway

MORE SKETCHES WANTED!

Notifications went out yesterday to everyone who posted work to our flickr group or sent images to me by our deadline, inviting them into Urban Sketchers' October 2013 show at Gallery North.  If you posted work and did not receive your email from me, please contact me as soon as you can.  We need further information and signed releases for the gallery from all participants.  Please return these forms I have sent you ASAP as we need to create wall labels and an inventory sheet for our host gallery.  If you have already framed your sketches (I know a few of you have!) please write and let me know that, too, because it may help us plan preview publicity in our run-up to the show.
Also, whether you are part of the Gallery North show or not, PLEASE participate in the concurrent exhibit at Edmonds' Cafe Louvre.  Post your work or send your images to me with your name and contact information (telephone number, email address, and the title, framed size, media and price for your sketch).  If you simply post or send me images, I will email you forms to fill out with the rest of the information.  We need this, again, so we can create wall labels for the cafe, and plan for space.
Making this a successful multi-venue event in Edmonds will help showcase and support Urban Sketchers and lead to more opportunities to carry on!
Post additional sketches on the flickr group "Urban Sketchers Celebrates Edmonds" and help make this a resounding celebration of urban sketching!
Beth
danan@seanet.com

Elderly Alders

Sat on the porch Sunday morning, out of the rain, and sketched these old alders along my friend Mari's driveway at Dabob Bay on Hood Canal.

Big Island Vacation Sketches

I have a hard time distinguishing between sketching and plein air painting so I hope it's okay to post examples of each. I did a couple of watercolor and pen sketches, with a little casein thrown in. And I did a few oil paintings on location. Each took about two and a half hours. One of the paintings turned out to be a demonstration of how oil and water don't mix.

I set up my easel on the cliffs below the Lekeleke Burial Grounds, south of Keauhou Bay, to do a painting of  the black lava shoreline. There are narrow slots in the cliffs, probably from collapsed lava tubes, and the waves that funnel into them get concentrated and occasionally burst out with spectacular spray, similar to the blow-holes that are found along the coast. As I painted, the slot next to me would periodically erupt with a boom followed by a brief silence, then the hiss of spray as it rained down on the rocks about 20 or 30 feet to my left.

After an  hour or so I got accustomed to the sound of the surf and feel of the light mist. At one point I noticed a couple of waves rolling in, much bigger than the ones I'd seen coming in for the past hour. I grabbed my easel to make a run for it  just as the first wave entered the slot, and before I could take two steps I heard, and felt through the ground, the huge WHUMP as the wave hit the cliff. Spray, along with part of the wave, launched 30 feet or more above the top of the cliff. What came down was not mist but a slap of salt water that drenched me and filled my easel, paint box and my pack with part of the Pacific.

I shook the water off my camera and dried it with some paper towels from a pocket in my pack. Then I poured the water out of my paint box, easel, and pack. Fortunately oil paint and water don't mix so I continued to paint, pushing beads of water out of the way with my brush as I worked.

Friday ad hoc

"Friday Sketchers" had a perfect day for our Olympic Sculpture Park ad hoc sketch outing.  There were 10 of us, counting Ann and Paul who were visiting from Michigan.  Paul found the outing listed on the Seattle Urban Sketchers blog.

I impressed myself by completing 3 sketches.  I think that's the most I've ever done in an outing.   I arrived early so did a quick 15 minute sketch of the Calder Eagle from the entry point of the park.

I'd used the park's website to look at the options and had decided I most wanted to sketch the Eye Benches.  When I found them, the scene I most wanted to sketch was closed for construction.  So I picked a different view that included the mountains, which I actually liked better.

I still had about a half hour so headed for the Eraser as that was my next favorite sketch subject.

As usual, we shared out sketches and then posed for a group photo.

Michigan Visitors, Paul and Ann, are standing on right

Introduction - Dave Boyd

I first learned about Urban Sketchers over a year ago after spotting some beautiful cards at La Tienda in Ballard, thinking that they looked like the work of my old grad school classmate and colleague, Gail Wong. Sure enough, they were, we reconnected after several years, and she invited me to come sketching. I finally did just over a year ago at the Ballard Locks.

A few months later I was invited to be a correspondent, and am finally getting around to it. I wanted to join in part to get my sketching chops back in anticipation of applying for a Northwest Institute fellowship in Italy. I was fortunate enough to receive it, and am currently enjoying their facilities in Civita di Bagnoregio, following on the heels of Stephanie Bower and soon to be joined by Anita Lehmann.

I can't pretend to match their skill, but will be posting my sketches from Civita over the remaining six weeks of my fellowship, both here and with more about Civita on my project blog. The seed of my proposal was this sketch I did of one of the institute's properties as a student in here in 1984.

So far, I have been busy digging through the archives and haven't done much sketching, except for this quick study of the arrival to the properties, inspired by an Urban Sketcher from Nashville who showed up with her paints outside my window. More to come...

Salish Lodge at Snoqualmie Falls Music on the Green

Salish Lodge at Snoqualmie Falls Music on the Green featuring Jason Dodson & Tim Gadbois of the Maldives.

Seattle Viaduct Cityscape

I got the dates mixed up and showed up 2 weeks early for the August sketchcrawl. Didn't realize until standing in line at Starbucks so since I had already skipped out on my aerobics and body sculpt classes thought I would sketch regardless. I found a quiet shady spot on the south end of the ferris wheel on Pier 57, listened to my audiobook, and sketched away. Nice peaceful Seattle morning especially after all the chaos of traveling the past weeks.

From Hiroshima to Hope

I

8/6/13 Lanterns floating on Green Lake.

n August 2001, I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I would imagine that it’s a difficult museum to experience no matter what nationality you are; as a Japanese American, I found it to be emotionally wrenching. I didn’t lose any relatives in the bombings, but I know survivors who – although they have shown no signs of radiation disease – still live in a vague shadow of fear every time they get a medical exam.

After the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most believed that it was a necessary end to World War II, which had certainly taken many, many lives. Seeing photos of the horrifyingly burned children and adults and those who died slowly in the weeks and months that followed, there is no slightest doubt that Japan paid heavily for Pearl Harbor. Twelve years later as I write this, my eyes still fill when I recall those images.

8/6/13 Seattle Kokon Taiko

These were some of my thoughts last night at Green Lake as I listened to blessings sung by Gurudwara Singh Sabha community members, koto and taiko performances, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” played by the Andean musical group Quichua Mashis (whom I sketched in April). Their performances were part of From Hiroshima to Hope, a program on Aug. 6 each year on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing to honor the Japanese victims as well as all victims of violence worldwide.

The program culminates with a Buddhist ritual and toro nagashi lantern floating ceremony on the lake. In Japan and other countries, the same type of ceremony is performed. The lanterns, hand-inscribed with prayers and the Japanese kanji character for peace, symbolize the souls of the dead released to the sea to find rest.



8/6/13 Audience listening to presentations.

 

During the stage performances and speaker presentations, I had plenty of light to sketch under the cloudless sky. But at dusk I could barely see my sketchbook or much of anything other than the softly flickering light of hundreds and hundreds of lanterns floating on Green Lake.

8/6/13 Members of Gurudwara Singh Sabha singing blessings.

8/6/13 Koto player



National Night Out

Tuesday night was National Night Out where block watch groups have their yearly gathering to meet and greet new and old neighbors.  It is the one event we celebrate with our neighbors during the year.
This year we had a bouncy house rented by one of the neighbors for the kids.  And the Magnolia Big Band playing.  What a treat...good food, good company and good music.

Seafair

This was my first time going to the Seafair races and I've lived here my whole life.  I found it to be alot of fun.
From what I understand there wasn't the same amount of people as typical because of the Blue Angels absence.  

clever and delightful, visual notes at Seattle Center

These hot, sunny days offer 'us' sketchers a great ability to really enjoy this amazing summer in Seattle.

As simple as these forms are at Fisher Pavilion, in fact, there is a real beauty to the architecture, 

 both clever and delightful.

Paris Cafe Crawl

I realize it's cliche, but I've dreamed for a long time of going to Paris to sit in the Cafes where the famous existentialists used to go. I finally made it to Paris a couple of weeks ago and got to spend some time on the Left Bank sketching in some of the historic Parisian cafes.

 This is the view from Le Deux Magots where Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir used to go. While sitting there sketching, my daughter and I met a man named Paul who lived in Paris for 24 years and owned an import store down the street called Simrane: http://simrane.com/.  We spent a nice afternoon sitting there, sketching, and talking to Paul and afterwards he invited us to his shop and gave us some beautiful bags imported from India. I was going to go back afterwards and touch this one up, but decided to just leave it as is to keep the memory of the afternoon.

My daughter grew up hearing me talk about Albert Camus and the Paris coffee shops. So, instead of the usual tourist stuff, we decided to create our own "Famous Parisian Cafe Crawl." We had planned to go to the Louvre that day, but we were so exhausted from our travels in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Brussels the week before, that we ended up sleeping in until 11 and didn't want to short-change our Cafe Crawl. My daughter had the great idea for me to do one sketch with pieces of each cafe, so we went to 5 historical Parisian Cafes: Cafe Procope, Cafe La Palette, Le Cafe de Flore, Cafe Bonaparte, and back again for a 2nd time to Les Deux Magots. I ran out of room so had to squeeze everything in. This was one of the best days of my life ...hanging out with my daughter going from cafe to cafe, checking out art galleries on the Left Bank, and topped off with a fast ride on a bike buggy that whisked us from the River Seine to our subway stop to the Eiffel Tower. One of our favorites was Cafe Procope which in 1686 was the first coffee shop in Europe introducing coffee brought from Turkey and the first Cafe in Paris. The upstairs of the Cafe was as beautiful as what we saw the next day in the Palace of Versailles. An all-around incredible time.