Here are three scenes from Seattle Center I drew during the monthly meeting of the Seattle Urban Sketchers group. The first is a quick study of the east entry to the former Armory, which is now known as the Center House.

The second is the interior of the Center House, which houses a large food court, entertainment stage, and a super-sized model train layout for the holidays.

The last is of Key Arena, former home of the Seattle Supersonics but still a successful venue for many sporting and cultural events.

In the community of urban sketchers, architects are sometimes viewed as practiced in drawing buildings but not as adept at drawing people. While my focus is usually on capturing architecture and spatial environments, the drawing of people is often required to give scale to spaces and animate the places I try to capture in my work. And when drawing portraits, sometimes I am lucky enough to capture the personality of an individual with just a few well-placed strokes. At other times, I struggle and make people look younger or older than they really are.

The human face and body are difficult to draw, much more difficult than drawing architecture. Except for the cartoonists who are able to distort salient characteristics to emphasize the personality being caricatured, most of us can easily fall prey to mistakes in proportion and unintentionally distort our subjects. Still, drawing people is often necessary and always a challenge to draw. Good practice subjects are classical sculptures because they don’t move around as you try to draw them.