Portland Art Museum

Today's assignment was to start out with a thumbnail (on little post-it notes that Mary handed out).  I sort of did that, but using my initial sketches, and, instead of clearing them once the final drawing was done, simply shrank them and moved them to the side.

Pug Crawl

A fundraiser for OHS

It turns out that pugs don't at all look alike.  Or don't all look alike.  First off, there are brown ones and black ones.  They have varying amounts of wrinkles on their faces, in different places.  Their noses tend to be squished into their faces, but some are more so than others.  Usually their tails curl up over their backs, but sometimes they flop down, like limp sausages.

Many of them were dressed up.  There was a dalek, and a bunch in poodle skirts.  One was strapped into a wheelchair.  There were a lot of dogs in the parking lot, and most were too excited to sit still and pose for us, so we mostly got quick impressions.

And, after we'd had our fill of pug faces, we found spots to watch the parade.  This year's theme was Blast to the Past! And there were pugs in covered wagons, and DeLoreans.  Pugs in tie-dye, and poodle skirts, and top hats  One pug was too tired to walk, so his person picked him up and carried him

Goats

Goats have the weirdest eyes, with a horizontal bar.  That stays parallel to the ground, no matter how they twist their heads.  It gives them a panoramic view of the horizon, which must be useful for a prey animal.

Open Mic

It was at a small place, and was filled with sketchers, with a band and flowers on the tables.  (It may have been organized by the owners, just to get people in the door.  Or it may have been people who follow the band.)

PAM

The challenge was to not faithfully reproduce what we saw (as cameras can now do that much better than we can), but to instill some sort of artist license.  I headed upstairs, and found myself drawn to a statue in the mesoamerican room.  So I did him twice, once as I saw him, and again richly colored, and with a coiffure.

Sketchcrawl in Woodlawn

I headed north from the meeting point, starting out by wandering through Woodlawn Park.  I sat down on the bridge and did a quick (of necessity) sketch of a mother and child on the slides.  They were gone before I'd finished, so half of the sketch was done from memory.













On to Woodlawn school, where I did a giant pottery urn, collecting rain-water for the adjoining gardens.

I'd been hearing trains to the north, so I headed to the edge of the school grounds to take a peek down the hill.  And saw looming over the industrial buildings on the flats, the OHS.  I hadn't realized that you could get to it from here.










Well, you can sort of get to it.  I headed down the hill and got across Lombard at a light.  But I'm way too old to try sprinting across Columbia.  So I leaned against a fence on the corner and sketched, first a massive old cherry tree on the grounds, and then the building itself.

First Hill in Seattle

I was up for a concert on Thursday, and stuck around for a sketchcrawl on Friday morning.  It was raining lightly for most of the morning, so I wandered around looking for places that were out of the rain and had a view of something interesting.  I circled the area for a bit until I ended up at the top of First Hill, tucked into the entrance of the Polyclinic, and sketching First Baptist (where the concert had been).  It's actually even more baroque than this.  I left out about half of the twiddly bits.

Then I headed back down to Pike and found a spot where I could see the dome of First Covenant (the body was hidden behind a building with a parking lot on its roof) with the buildings of downtown rising behind it.

By this time the rain had finally stopped, so I walked down to do the Plymouth Columns, which were still dark with the morning's rain.  The trees in the park have grown significantly since I left town.