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!

Quite time in Suzzallo Reading Room

It was great to join the other Seattle Sketchers who braved the gray, rain AND the time change yesterday. 

Of course, I was drawn to sketch the view in the reading room, looking UP (getting into the mindset to teach "Soaring Spaces" in Manchester this summer.) What a beautiful space and probably the closest thing we have to England in Seattle.  

This sketch took about 1 hour 15 minutes, was done with a .5 mechanical pencil on an 8" x 16" Fluid watercolor block with Winsor & Newton watercolors.  I'll post the entire process on my blog later today. If you click on this image, you should be able to see the detail.

And I have to add that I'm the proud mom of two current UW students!  Go Dawgs!!

From the Convention Center, this summer

I wasn't able to make the last Seattle Sketchcrawl, but I have recently done a sketch from the Convention Center.  This summer, I taught a quick workshop as part of the Northwest Watercolor Society's anniversary celebration activities. 

I walked a pretty large group up to this spot on the top floor, then turned and sketched the view out the window.  It was a super quick demo, but good for explaining the eye level and how the vanishing point works in sketching urban streets. Most of the NWWS folks are studio painters, so urban sketching was new to most of them!

I snapped a quick photo of the sketch before giving it to one of the workshop participants, who also took one of my Good Bones workshops, and traveled all the way from out-of-state. Thank you!

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!