My stay in Rio during my recent trip to Brazil for the Urban Sketching Symposium was very short, just about 35 hours, but quite memorable nonetheless. Here are some moments I recorded in my sketchbook. Exuberant locals strutting down the…
I have a bunch of old Life magazines at home that I’ve been browsing recently in search of inspiration. Whenever I find work that catches my eye, I mark it with a post-it note. Here’s an example: An article written…
Family and friends rarely visit us in Seattle. Most of them live just too far away, either on the East Coast or Spain. But this summer, we hit the jackpot with a special guest. Our nephew Seth, a 19-year-old journalism…
I first heard of a “sinking ship” building in reference to a Seattle parking garage built on a sloping street near the iconic Smith Tower. When you look at it straight on, the building resembles the bow of a ship…
I hardly came up with an original name for my sketching journal. A reader who recently travelled to Melbourne emailed me a photo of a much, much older instance where the word “Sketcher” featured big in newsprint. It shows a…
How do you call a sketch of something that is already a drawing or a painting? A meta sketch? If so, I did some meta-sketching for my latest column. As you can see in my “trophy shot,” above, the subject…
The sketch doesn’t fit on the page? No worries. That happened to me the other day while I sketched longshore workers at The Port of Seattle. I drew the person quickly first, but made her too big in relation to…
Ronald Ginther’s watercolors are a rare visual document of the Depression years in the Seattle area. Ginther painted events he experienced in jails, homeless camps and demonstrations. I’m not sure how much he drew on the spot, but his works…
Spring and sketching go hand in hand. I spent a wonderful April weekend co-teaching a sketching workshop in Pullman, Washington. My partners were Frank Ching and Gail Wong and our host was professor Bob Krikac, of the Washington State University…
As far as drawing techniques go, watercolor can be really frustrating. As soon as the paint hits the paper, it seems to take a life of its own. Wait for it to dry, and the results may be far from…