Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Sketching at Magnuson Park

I took a day off work today, and luckily it was not raining or windy or too cold to go out sketching, although it was overcast the whole time and never got quite warm enough for an extended outing.

Truman and I headed to Magnuson Park, where I had big plans for sketching all through it, from one end to the other -- but after two hours, I'd only made it a very short way, from the southernmost end by the boat launch to Kite Hill.

I could easily have spent several more hours there if it had been just a little warmer and a lot sunnier.  Still, I got some fun sketching in.

Here is the southern end showing the sculpture "Straight Shot" (by Perri Lynch), which features six-foot-high limestone columns with holes bored in them that line up.


Next, I wandered a short ways down a path to a stand of birch trees with one dying madrone, and sketched that:


Not far away stood a few piles of boulders, so I stopped again to sketch one pile:


Truman was bored by now, so we went back to the car and drove to the Kite Hill parking lot for a quick food and water break.  Then we tootled over to the art installation called "The Fin Project: From Swords to Plowshares" (by John T. Young), which is composed of submarine fins made to resemble a pod of whales.


There is so much more to sketch at the park -- I'll certainly be back!

3 comments:

  1. All terrific and I really like the use of color rather than just plain old black and white. NIce job.

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    1. Thanks! I was severely annoyed to realize that I'd left my travel watercolor kit at work, and thought I'd only be able to do black-and-white. But then I remembered I had water-soluble colored pencils, and took them along. But I had no water, so had to wait til I got back home to brush on some water and turn the colored pencil marks into watercolor. And actually, I did do the top sketch in just black pen, and added watercolor later at home from memory, which is pretty easy to do with landscape (bushes and evergreen trees green! deciduous trees, logs, and ground in winter brown! Mt Rainier pale blue shadows!).

      Am definitely going to remember to bring the travel sketch supplies home today -- the colored pencils work okay but are not as easy to use as the watercolors.

      Oh, and those dark blue boulders? I mistakenly thought I was using a water-soluble BLACK pen. When I got home and added water, that deep blue appeared, much to my surprise. I kind of like it.

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