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Friday, April 19: U Village

Sunday, October 25, 2015

49th World Wide SketchCrawl at Gates Foundation

10/24/15 Iron Lung exhibit
For the 49th quarterly World Wide SketchCrawl, Urban Sketchers Seattle met at the Gates Foundation Visitors Center. This was my second visit there, and as I was last time, I was impressed by the varied ways in which the foundation is improving people’s lives around the world. So many things we take for granted, like having a flushing toilet, clean drinking water and contraception, are not easily accessible to many, many people. I always learn interesting things there, like the fact that smelly socks are used to trap and kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes!

10/24/15 window facing Fifth Avenue North
Although the foundation is inspiring in many ways, I admit that I wasn’t particularly visually inspired for sketching subjects. After wandering around for a while, I settled on the Iron Lung, which also attracted several other sketchers. According to the video loop playing nearby (which, unfortunately, we sketchers all had to hear many times and probably memorized by the time our sketches were done!), a polio patient would have to spend two to three weeks inside the Iron Lung until they recovered enough to breathe on their own. A stand was attached so that the patient could read a book, but someone else would have to turn the pages. A mirror allowed them to “see the world around them.”

After that sketch, I found a window facing Fifth Avenue North and sketched several maples shedding leaves on the sidewalk. 

1 comment:

  1. Nice! Love the cars and the little people out the window! I had a hard time with those.

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