As part of the conference this week at the Medellin campus of the National University of Colombia, I was able to offer a couple of workshops for the students, something I always enjoy doing. Last Wednesday morning, we met at Botero Square in downtown Medellin, a hub of activity and urban life named after Fernando Botero, whose large, voluminous works are scattered throughout the park.
Here are examples of the sketches that I use to demonstrate capturing the essential structure of a scene.
After two days of paper presentations and seminars at the Medellin campus of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, a small group of faculty and students took a van ride to the Big Rock (El Peñol de Guatapé), about two hours northeast of Medellin. Along the way, we stopped in Guatapé, where Roberto Guerrero Pérez of Concepción, Chile, did this sketch of me drawing the view from a boat which was taking us on a tour of Represa Guatapé.
Later, I took a half hour to draw this view of the town square
In 1953—the year Frank Sinatra signed with Capitol Records, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected U.S. President, and Elvis Presley made his first recordings—Dick Spady, Warren Ghormley, and Tom Thomas had an idea for a place where one could park easily and enjoy quality food at low prices with instant service. Despite bank executives not believing in this business model, the first Dick’s Drive-In opened on January 28th, 1954, at 111 NE 45th Street in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. Initially offering 19-cent burgers, Dick’s menu has expanded but still focuses on the American classics—100% fresh beef burgers, hand-cut fries, and hand-whipped shakes.
With just six locations, Dick’s remains a Seattle institution, not only due to its burgers, fries, and shakes, but also because it offers fair wages, provides employer-paid health insurance coverage to all of its employees, grants employee education scholarships, and gives generously to local charities that serve the homeless.
In a recent issue of The New Yorker, John McPhee wrote an article entitled Omission: Choosing what to leave out. In the essay McPhee references Ernest Hemingway’s Theory of Omission, which encourages writers to let the reader do the creating by leaving white spaces between chapters or segments of chapters, the unwritten thoughts to be articulated by the reader. McPhee advocates letting the reader have the experience and leaving judgment in the eye of the beholder.
This idea of omission can also be applied to drawing as well. Just as writing is a matter of selecting and stringing words together to create a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter, sketching is a matter of drawing a line, then another, and another, until one creates shapes and compositions that recall to the seeing eye the scene set before us. And what we omit from a drawing is just as important as what we include.
I spent an enjoyable weekend in Portland co-teaching a Line-to-Color workshop with Gail Wong. We had the benefit of pleasant weather, Portland offers great sketching sites, and we had the opportunity to work with an ardent group of sketchers. As in any workshop, there is little time to sketch on one’s own but I managed to do one before the group met on Sunday morning and a couple more later on in the afternoon when members of the Portland Urban Sketchers joined our group at the Portland Saturday Market site on the riverfront.
Here are a few more sketches from my recent visit to Manhattan, Kansas. The second is of the International Student Center, which I studied because of its unusual inward orientation to a courtyard, unlike most of the other structures on the KSU campus.
I did this very quick sketch during a walk through the 8000-acre Konza Prarie, a former cattle ranch and now a tallgrass prarie preserve in the Flint Hills of northeastern Kansas, jointly owned by the Nature Conservancy and Kansas State University, which conducts ecological research and manages conservation in the preserve. I drew only the path ahead of me and a treeline in an arroyo between two ridges. All of that white space you see are prarie grasses, a mix of big bluestem, little bluestem, Indiangrass, and switchgrass.
A quick sketch of a scene on the Kansas State University campus in preparation for two days of workshops for beginning students in the College of Architecture, Planning & Design.
Three years ago, I sketched this view from the Burke-Gilman Trail of the Aurora Bridge as it spans the Ship Canal in Fremont. Yesterday, I took the opportunity of the sunshine to draw this view from further east along the Burke-Gilman, where the dock of the Lake Washington Rowing Club juts out into the waters where the Ship Canal meets Lake Union. On the right, nestled below the Aurora Bridge, you can see a few of the many houseboat communities along the shores of Lake Union.
EPSON MFP image
This is Destee-Nation Shirt Company’s retail outlet in the Fremont neighborhood, snuggled next to Les Amis just west of the PCC market. Destee-Nation designs, silk-screens, and sells T-Shirts featuring the logos of locally owned small businesses and other cultural landmarks of Seattle. In addition to gaining permission to use these icons, Destee-Nation gives a percentage of each sale to the neighborhood diner, vintage record store, or mom-and-pop shop being represented. A few are included in the scene above.
Since its beginning in 2004 at its Greenlake warehouse here in Seattle, Destee-Nation has since expanded its offerings to include the logos of small businesses in other states, such as Arizona, California, Texas, and Hawaii.
To mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of my first book, Architectural Graphics, I want to give a brief history of its birth.
In my first teaching job in the School of Architecture at Ohio University, one of my assignments was an architectural graphics course. This was in 1972, a time before personal desktop computers, when the mimeograph machine was being replaced gradually by the photocopier, and letters, memos, and other correspondence were being typed on an IBM Selectric. To prepare for each class, I would hand-letter and hand-draw notes the night before and have the notes photocopied for the students. At the end of the semester, I had compiled over 400 pages of material.
The chair of the department, Forrest Wilson, took the class notes to his publisher in New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, who expressed interest in publishing my class notes. I asked that the price for the book be set at $4.95 and VNR said that would be possible if I were able to edit the material down to 128 pages. After the 1974–75 academic year ended, I was able to produce all 128 camera-ready pages in a three-week period, drawing on plain white bond paper with a Scripto lead pencil, a drafting triangle, and a scale.
I still remember delivering the final, camera-ready pages to VNR’s offices in New York City, and, sitting in a small office with the copyeditor, making corrections to the text on the spot using an eraser and an erasing shield.
Here are a few sample pages from the first edition of Architectural Graphics.
