Sketching Indoors

Here are a couple of sketches done while drinking coffee and nibbling on pastry. This one was done in the Daily Cafe that's inside Rejuvenation Hardware. I wanted to copy this recipe (even though it was only one day after Thanksgiving) and the old cabinet seemed like a good accompaniment to it. This was a fun place to draw, in part because the delightful wait-staff would sometimes break into singing and dancing to the Abba tunes being played. Even some customers were swaying to the tunes while they got their coffee additives from the cabinet.

This sketch was done at Kennedy School. I'm pretty sure I stole the the orange lantern composition from one Kalina did at a sketchcrawl a year ago. It's a great place to draw, but I left out a lot of what's really there.  There's too much for me to get into a sketch.

I Want an i-Phone

My son took a picture of my Floyd's sketch with his i-phone. What a difference it makes in terms of the color as compared to the scanner image. And unlike using the scanner, it took just a fraction of a second to take the picture and load it to the Macbook. If I had an i-Phone,  I might actually post more often, and I could use Brushes... Now, if only there weren't those monthly phone fees....

 

Sketching at Floyd's Coffee Shop

It was a rainy day to be sketching outside, so I stayed inside and sketched at Floyd's. Linda joined me to finish her painting. I used pens from a Pitt terra set and the results feel more like me than anything I've sketched lately.  There are definitely problems with the sketches, but I'm eager to try this method again.

Hollywood Sketchcrawl--Veterans Day

The Portland Urban Sketchers went to the Hollywood district to draw on Veterans Day. This sketch shows two of the sketchers drawing the Hollywood Theater. The flag is still up from the parade.

Hollywood Theater from the east side.

Portland's Food Carts

Portland has so many food carts and some are very creatively decorated, making them fun to sketch. This week, I sketched food carts at 43rd and Belmont and also at Mississippi and Skidmore.

This sketch isn't done yet. It needs some sort of background or maybe people. The cart is called Lucille's Balls and serves organic meatballs.  It's a very cheerful yellow cart, decorated with giant poppies. The retro table along with the fresh flowers make it look very inviting even to someone who rarely eats meat.

This delightfully named food cart (Euro Trash) is located at 43rd and Belmont in SE Portland. I didn't try any of their food this time, but I loved the name "Oregon Donor" of one of the menu items.

The Ruby Dragon is a food cart on Mississippi Avenue. Several sketchers converged on this site today to draw and paint the colorful carts and eat the yummy food. I tasted a friend's delicious sandwich from here and then ordered a giant bowl of Miso soup which was tasty and big enough for several people to share. Sprout and the other man who were working here today were very friendly and obliging when we wanted to include them in our drawings. I'm sure glad to live in Portland.

The Canvas: Model in a Feather Hat

This week at the Canvas, there was one model who wore an enormous black feather hat.

The tables at the Canvas have little armatures, which make for good warm-ups.

With this, I decided to ignore the hat color.
(Maybe the model will look like this when she's much older.)

A pencil sketch of the model.

This pose was tricky for me to make interesting.

Some Symposium Instructors

Ever since the Urban Sketching Symposium, in July, I've been much more interested in sketching instead of scanning, but I've decided to start posting some of my sketches from those incredible three days. Here are some quick sketches of some of the wonderful instructors. (Sorry to Jason for having words in his hair, but I drew it in the dark during his flickr lecture.)

Gabi

JasonIsabel and LapinVeronica, whose foot was outside the thumbnail sketch.