June 2018: Rose Festival Season

Coffee and sketching on the waterfront...

Fierce dragon boats...

Reed College

A stunningly beautiful day in the Portland Rose Test Gardens of Washington Park. Everybody seems happy and the flowers are exquisite. Even the bees are happy.

Sketching the Japanese Garden in Lithia Park, Ashland. Unfortunately, this is the scene of where K lost her art supplies.

Summer Sketches

 I'm trying to bring this blog up-to-date. These are miscellaneous sketches done last summer.

One day, sketching near PSU, we met a lot of people. One of them was a visiting professor from China who showed me how to draw shrimp.

This was sketched at a nursery in NE Portland.

These two sketches were made on 28th, on the edge of our neighborhood.

On the waterfront...

The top of the Congregational Church from the Portland Art Museum

A stein from the cabin mantle

Tilikum Crossing with the Urban Sketchers of Portland

Kennedy School Patio on a hot morning

Drawing People

Last summer, in preparation for going to the Urban Sketching Symposium in Chicago, I tried to practice drawing lots of people. Unfortunately, sometimes they walked away, just as I was going to draw them.

Other times, they were far away to begin with...

It worked best when I just concentrated on people, but often, I only had time for or only had a view of their heads.

After all the practice, once I was in Chicago, I was so awestruck by the architecture, I hardly drew people.

Portland's Festival of Flowers

Every year for the Portland Rose Festival, there's a display of flowers in Pioneer Courthouse Square. This year, Bill Will designed 'You Are Here', a map of the world using 20,000 plants.  This sketch shows South America, looking northward. The plants that were used included marigolds, impatients,  tomatoes, mint, camomile, salvia, begonias, and more. Later this week, the plants will be on sale, so I'll be back again for some good bargains.

The next sketches were made at Jamison Square. Sometime I'll post a drawing of the fountain where people watch the toddlers play, but it's a perspective challenge that is really difficult for me.

There are always lots of boats and ships around for Rose Festival. Recently, the Portland Urban Sketchers spent a lovely sunny Saturday sketching at Riverplace. The boat in the foreground looks like it would be really fun to zip around in, but it wasn't really that short.

This last sketch was done at Kennedy School in the Courtyard Restaurant. The McMenamin's restaurants and inns are filled with art in every nook and cranny. I especially like the lamps in this room.

We're hoping for less rain and more sun in Portland. My sketching friends and I are all eager to be outside drawing.

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.