Rainy Craven Farms

10/18/15 Dutch, the face painter

I’m starting to associate pumpkin farms with inclement weather. Three years ago Urban Sketchers Seattle met at Fall City Farms to sketch in the pouring rain. The year after, we met at Craven Pumpkin Farms in Snohomish, where I dressed in down jacket and tights and still shivered in the foggy cold.

This morning, again at Craven Farms, I was thinking we were finally going to break our streak of pumpkin farm bad weather luck. It had drizzled a bit on my way east out of Seattle, but by the time I set up my stool in front of an old truck surrounded by pumpkins (below), the rain had stopped and the temperature was mild. But no sooner had I started putting paint on, the rain began again – and this time it was solid rain, not drizzle. I stayed in denial a while longer – long enough for my watercolor technique to be called wet-on-wet.

10/18/15 Dutch at work on another client.

I ducked into various shelters around the farm, including a hand-washing station tent filled with sketchers. I wasn’t too excited by the tree and gourd stands I could see from my spot in a leaky corner of the tent, so I moved on.

Thankfully, I wound up in the animal barn, where I wouldn’t have minded sketching a few goats and kittens, but I found something better: Dutch, the face painter. With a pumpkin-orange Mohawk, Dutch painted elaborately flourished butterflies, jack-o-lanterns and other images on the faces of young clients. He’s so fast that he finished several kids in the time it took me to do one sketch of him. I had so much fun that I moved around to the other side to do a second sketch.

Despite the weather, we had a good showing of USk Seattle, who aren’t daunted by a little rain. (We complain, but we aren’t daunted.)

10/18/15 Inadvertent wet-on-wet technique.

10/18/15