Urban Sketching Symposium Paraty

imageA view of Capela de N. Sra. das Dores in Paraty, Brazil, during the 2014 Urban Sketching Symposium. This will be one of the many sketches that will be sold tomorrow evening in a silent auction to benefit the Urban Aketchers organization. I’ve completed two workshops and have a third scheduled tomorrow morning. Great participants, enthusiastic and appreciative in a beautiful colonial village on the Bay of Paraty.

Lief Erickson

Here is a quick sketch of a statue of Lief Erickson at Shilshole Bay Marina, overlooking Puget Sound. The bronze sculpture was given by the Lief Erickson League to the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 and installed at the marina when it opened that same year.

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The words are from a plaque on the statue’s base and refers to Lief Erickson’s assumed birthplace of Iceland. The famous Norse explorer (ca. 970–1020) is believed to have been the first European to reach North America five centuries before Christopher Columbus. To commemorate the legacy of Scandinavian immigrants who settled in Ballard, surrounding the statue (but not drawn) are stones containing names of local immigrant families, the year they arrived, and their community of origin.

Off to Brazil tomorrow for the Urban Sketching Symposium in Paraty

Shilshole Bay Marina

A view of Shilshole Bay Marina, captured when the Seattle Urban Sketchers group met this past Sunday morning. It was challenging but fun to try to convey the number and density of watercraft, masts, and equipment, as well as their reflections in the water.

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Owned and operated by the Port of Seattle, Shilshole Bay Marina is located in the northwest Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, next to Golden Gardens Park on Puget Sound. While the waterfront location was deeded to the Port in 1931, the marina itself was not operational until after its dedication during the Seattle’s World Fair in 1962. It has more than 1400 slips for boats ranging in size from skiffs and kayaks to ocean-going yachts, and the facility includes a public plaza, fishing piers, and public boat launch

A View from the Bridge

EmilyWilliams

It’s often said that the real power in an administrative office lies in the person who commands the front desk. This is a view from such a desk, drawn as a retirement gift for Emily Louise Williams back in 1994 when she retired after 25 years of devoted service to the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (now the College of Built Environments) at the University of Washington. I still remember sneaking into the college office to do the drawing while Emily was taking her lunch break.

Negative Spaces

Along with a few fellow architect-volunteers from the community service committee of the AIA Young Architects Forum, I met this morning with a group of middle schoolers attending the Northwest School Summer Camp. Our task was to introduce some basic drawing concepts to the young students. My topic was negative space, a concept that is somewhat difficult to grasp, especially when translating the in-between spaces that we see in real life into the two-dimensional shapes we draw on paper. After the session, I remembered an animation that I had created a while back when I was conceiving of a ebook on drawing. Here is an unedited version of Seeing Shapes.

SeeingShapes

Keep in mind that it is often easier to see shapes in a photograph and more difficult to see them when drawing on location from direct observation.