Happy Birthday, USk Tacoma!

6/4/16 Museum of Glass

Urban Sketchers Tacoma celebrated its third birthday today in arguably one of the most picturesque and sketchable parts of town: the Museum of Glass near the waterfront. Sketching the magnificent glass art of Dale Chihuly and company inside the musuem and its hot shop would have been a great rain contingency option, but nothing could have brought me indoors today – high 70s, a cool breeze off the water and that bright blue sky!

6/4/16 Chihuly's Crystal Towers

First up before the day got too warm was the museum’s glassy, asymmetrical conical structure that has become a Tacoma icon. I first sketched this thoroughly daunting subject four years ago when we held a regional sketchcrawl there. 

See the blue thing just to the left of the cone? It’s one of the Dale Chihuly’s blue Crystal Towers, which I sketched in the cool shade from the Bridge of Glass (where you can see a bit of the cone to the right). It’s fun when I can find two compositions that show the same subjects from different places.

The celebration continued over lunch at The Rock Wood Fired Kitchen. Unlike some sketch groups where sketching over the post-sketch outing meal is part of the tradition, Seattle and Tacoma usually don’t. But today Kate and I decided to change that. Heck, I even sketched my pizza! (Well, after I’d eaten a few slices.)

6/4/16 Pizza and more sketching!

Urban Sk-egg-ing in Tacoma

4/4/15 Native American basketweaving

It had been ages since I visited the Washington State History Museum, so when Urban Sketchers Tacoma invited Seattle sketchers to join them this morning for a group-rate discount, I jumped at the opportunity.

This museum is the kind of place where I felt torn between lingering in the exhibits to take in my native state’s rich cultural and industrial heritage – or sketch. You can probably guess which I chose, but it was a difficult choice. My first sketch was part of an exhibit on Native American culture – an interpretive display of a woman teaching a young girl how to basket-weave. While I sketched, I listened to the audio program about how the craft has been handed down from one generation to the next.

4/4/15 Aerospace exhibit

For my next sketch, I went upstairs to find a view of the main floor gallery’s exhibit of the aerospace industry. That’s when I spotted Stevie – a tiny dot dwarfed by the framework of a plane’s fuselage looming over the space. (The dude at left is not real; I think he represented an airplane manufacturing worker.)

By that time the morning had warmed up a little, so I went out to do two iconic Tacoma sketches from just outside the history museum: Union Station and the Museum of Glass’s conical building. These Urban Sk-eggs took a little planning – namely, I had to bring my support materials in a cooler!

Happy Easter!

4/4/15 Union Station

4/4/15 Museum of Glass

A Perfect Day in Tacoma

We really hit the mark on Saturday.  No rain and a perfect day for sketching.  Tacoma is so picturesque the scale of the city is just right.  Sky, water, historic buildings,  the Glass museum and about 35 urban sketchers.  We had a great turnout for our second annual Pacific Northwest regional sketchcrawl.  It was great meeting up with the Portland Sketchers and Whidbey Island Sketchers. Seattle had a great turnout of longtime and new sketchers.  Thanks all for coming and making it a great day!

Looking at Union Station from the Washington State Historic Museum

On the Bridge to Tacoma Museum of Glass