Soggy Saturday Morning with WSU Students

A soggy Seattle welcome to the large group of design students from WSU! Rained out from the Sculpture Park, they ended up at the Gates Foundation Visitor Center to sketch and make notes for a few hours.

I have sketched here several times already (and I worked on this project with Olson Kundig for over a year), so I wanted to pick a new view... 

Here is the line drawing. As I teach in my Craftsy classes (info on my blog), I always start with the big shapes, then locate my vanishing point, and to speed things up, I often use a small triangle to snap quick long and straight lines. This would be a really difficult view to draw without knowing where the VP and eye level line are... hard to rely just on just shapes to get this one right!  It is so much easier to just use the VP. I also fill in the sketch working from left to right to minimize my pencil smearing...

I'm also trying out a different sketchbook, the Handbook 8" x 8". I don't like the paper as much as the Pentalic's true 140lb, but the format is great...

Then I added color...it was hard to see in the dim light!  I paint like an architect, thinking about how I want to paint the volumes, the solids/voids.  I start with a pale, bluish purple worked into the areas that recede.  Next I'll add yellows, usually based on a yellow ochre, to warm the areas I want to advance in space or glow.  And the hardest of all, I reserve the white of my paper where I want to show a bright sense of light...the hardest thing about watercolor is where you DON'T paint!

And here are some of the WSU students (and two Seattle Urban Sketchers!!) --their teachers, Bob Krikac and Carrie Vielle are wonderful and really TEACH their students to draw.  It was great to see them all!

Gates Foundation Visitor Center

Almost a month ago we met at the Gates Foundation Visitor Center on a blustery Saturday. It's a beautiful building with lots of long clean lines, but I had a hard time settling into a viewpoint. I tried the hallway and some people.

 

So I stepped outside, found a place out of the wind started with a thumbnail, then a larger view. 

The best part of the visitor center was the stories and displays of all the projects around the world. I hope to go back another time to read more of them in detail.  

Hearing Voices

Really great to join Seattle Urban Sketchers at the Gates Foundation Visitor Center to mark the World Wide SketchCrawl day!!

I had the really good fortune to get to work on this project for over a year with Olson Kundig Architects.  After over 125 schematic design pencil sketches, it is really interesting and a true pleasure to go to the Visitor Center and see it in action.  Really brilliant design work on the part of OK team and that amazing Alan Maskin.

This is a view from the Voices Gallery.  Every so often, I'd turn my head as I could hear children's voices and people talking, only to realize it was a recording!

Fashion and Exercise at the Gates Foundation

Saturday I spent WWSCD at the Gates Foundation's Visitor Center with Seattle USk. But no Iron Lungs for me. In any museum or exhibit, I always manage to zero in on the clothing and textile pieces. Which, I suppose, illustrates the genius of the Foundation's PR department. The Visitor Center presents the various projects and missions of the Foundation in an interactive and approachable way, designed so there is something that will catch everyone's attention.

The health care workers' jacket by Chinese designer Han Feng, which I started with, was commissioned by the Foundation as part of a series to illustrate various medical projects. And the jacket is a pretty brilliant and wearable two-layer design using both traditional Chinese and western tailoring. The designer also incorporated practical elements like pockets and reflective tape, recycled fabric from military uniforms and modern embroidery.

49th World Wide SketchCrawl at Gates Foundation

10/24/15 Iron Lung exhibit

For the 49^th 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. 

At the Gates Foundation Visitor Center

Took my Cornish drawing class last Friday to sketch at the Gates Foundation Visitor Center, then stayed later to sketch.  I had the wonderful opportunity to work on this project for over a year with Olson Kundig Architects, the project turned out so beautifully.  It's a great place to sketch and the VC staff is very welcoming.

I painted using a simple triad of Nickel Azo, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, and Cobalt Blue.  It's amazing how many colors you can mix with just a simple 3 paints. I wish I had adjusted the perspective more to get a better sense of the wide angle, but I was tired and hungry!