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Saturday, Sept. 13: Georgetown Steam Plant
Showing posts with label Suzallo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Suzallo. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Notes From Underground

As part of my New Year's Resolutions and efforts towards general well-being, I'm on a bit of a tech-sabbatical. I deleted Facebook and Messenger from my phone and rarely check my email. It has been a welcome relief reconnecting with the real world and my flesh-and-blood friends in real time.

I haven't slowed down on the drawing however, and have some catching up to do on posting, so here are a few drawings from the last month.












I took my On Location students from Gage Academy to Wallingford Center and drew this scene as a demo. I took a dozen in-progress photos as I worked but I'll spare you all but one.

I'm often asked about my "no pencil" policy, and for the sake of transparency here is the kind of laborious and pains-taking pencil plan I create before inking. As you can see, a long time was spent on this stage (about 30 seconds).






Another scene drawn at Wallingford Center, completed in short bursts between consulting one-on-one with my students who were scattered around the building.

It's a welcoming location where I'll also be teaching my 10 x 10 class on St. Patty's Day.











    













The class also visited King Street Station with the assignment of finding a viewpoint with detail and depth, and to use atmospheric perspective to suggest distance.



Stimson-Green Mansion is good for students interested in architecture, but the rooms are dimly lit. The spaces with the most natural light tend to be the bathrooms and the kitchen- not the most historic of settings.


In my drive to get students to put down their pencils and draw directly in ink, I did this quick silly drawing of a librarian at Suzallo Library. I wanted to show that a wobbly drawing done as a modified blind contour isn't fatal. I was grateful that the librarian seemed unself-conscious about me staring at her for 20 minutes while I inked my way through this bland setting, trusting that my undisciplined pen lines would add up to something.



 














And the US Bank building corporate arch-thingie, where I was gently hassled by a security guard who asked me to put my chair back and move along.

If you'll be in Georgetown anytime during March or April, I'll have a show of a dozen large color drawings (17x23) at All-City Coffee. Not technically urban sketches, but using the same technique:

Monday, January 21, 2013

More Suzallo Arches

As I drove into Seattle, it was stunning to see the bright sunshine after our week of enclosed cold. Nonetheless I stayed inside like most of us and was thankful for the protection from the cool temperatures. 


The reading room is almost a cathedral 

and the stairway arches reminiscent of Piranesi

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Suzzallo Library - 3rd Floor South Allen Stacks - HV Crime Section

When I heard that today's sketchcrawl was at Suzzallo library I thought I would like to do something different than I did last time when I sketched the front of the building. I thought it would be fun to go back into the stacks where I first started thinking about what would later become my career as a Criminal Justice/Criminology professor. So I found the old familiar HV section ... some of the books on the shelves...The Criminal Personality, The Onion Field, Sexual Homicide Patterns and Motives, Crime and the American Dream, Punishment and Social Control, Acting Out: Maladaptive Behavior in Confinement, Letters from Attica, Life and Death in Sing Sing, Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla, Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide,  Sex Crimes, Women, Murder, and Justice, Women Serial and Mass Murderers, Evil Doers, Convicts, Profiling Violent Crimes, Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation, Postmortem....As I sat there sketching I remembered many a day long ago lost in some of these books. A peaceful afternoon sketching down memory lane thinking about how powerful books can be in shaping the course of a persons life.