An ad hoc group of Seattle Urban Sketchers met this morning at the Kubota Garden in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle. Fujitaro Kubota purchased the five-acre parcel of swampland in 1927 and proceeded to clear the land, dig several ponds, and create a spectacular landscape merging Japanese design techniques with North American materials. As the now 20-acre garden was threatened by developers, the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board designated the garden a Historical Landmark in 1981. The City of Seattle acquired the grounds in 1987, which is now stewarded by the Kubota Garden Foundation.

These two views is of the latest addition to the garden, the Terrace Outlook, the base of which was constructed by the Awatas, a 15th-generation family of Japanese artisan stone masons, along with a host of volunteer workers. Drawing a view dominated by landscaping and plant materials with a fountain pen requires paying attention to the various textures of the plant materials and using patterns of light and dark shapes to create implied layers of depth.

One could spend an entire day sketching in the Kubota Garden and so I plan on returning to capture more views.

Amid a lot of controversy, the Royal Dutch Shell oil rig Polar Pioneer docked recently at Terminal 5 in Seattle to be fitted and supplied for oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast. When the 400-foot-long vessel arrived after a 12-hour journey from Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula, it was met by by environmental activists in kayaks and on shore protesting the proposed drilling in the Arctic ecosystem in general, and more specifically, the presence of the oil rig in Seattle.

The Seattle Urban Sketchers met yesterday at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture on the University of Washington campus. Among the museum’s collections are masks representing the cultural heritage of the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and Asia. This is the Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask, depicting an eagle, that is believed to be the inspiration for the original Seahawks logo from 1975.

Masks have been used for millennia in the rituals and ceremonies of different cultures. Here are a few examples from the Burke Museum’s collection.

Drawing objects presents different challenges than when sketching buildings and environments. Instead of depicting forms in space and spatial relationships, we are tasked with capturing both the three-dimensional form of a mask and its unique expressiveness, whether the mask is intended to disguise, protect, or entertain.

Tucked in amongst a row of buildings on Pike Place in Seattle is the “first” Starbucks store, which is one of the main tourist attractions in the historic Pike Place Market district. You still see this store being photographed at all hours of the day and throughout the year. Even though a plaque inside proclaims this to be the first Starbucks store, from 1971 through 1976 there was an earlier Starbucks at 2000 Western Avenue, which sold only whole coffee beans while serving free samples of brewed coffee.

As with my drawing of the Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room, the drawing of the first Starbucks store involved three phases: a quick compositional study, a rough pencil layout submitted for approval, and finally, the finished ink-line drawing.

Here is a quick sketch of a statue of Lief Erickson at Shilshole Bay Marina, overlooking Puget Sound. The bronze sculpture was given by the Lief Erickson League to the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 and installed at the marina when it opened that same year.

The words are from a plaque on the statue’s base and refers to Lief Erickson’s assumed birthplace of Iceland. The famous Norse explorer (ca. 970–1020) is believed to have been the first European to reach North America five centuries before Christopher Columbus. To commemorate the legacy of Scandinavian immigrants who settled in Ballard, surrounding the statue (but not drawn) are stones containing names of local immigrant families, the year they arrived, and their community of origin.

Off to Brazil tomorrow for the Urban Sketching Symposium in Paraty