Back in the grandeur of the Northwest and glorious Seattle. A town whose weather has never put me off.
Spent a glorious day by the Cedar River just 50 yards from an old train tressel that spans the river to the right. But a couple hours of drawing burnt the bejeezus outta my neck.
 
 
 
 
 
  Great time on the West coast, 2 cities, Portland & Seattle that I really like. Warts & All. And just so you know…that 4 hour delay was on UNITED.
Had to head back to the Northeast for demos in Portland, Salem and Seattle while it was very hot in Chicago. Lucked into spectacular weather on the West coast.
I had the first day in Portland to just run around so, I met up with Gail Vines and Bill Sharp and drew in Jameson Park for about 2 hours. It’s a beautiful inner city, block size park with a nice sloping and shaded grass lawn, and a water park with the stacked block sculpture you see in the full sun. It was teeming with way more kids and adults than I cared to draw. My work schedule was packed and that was the longest period I would enjoy to just sit and work on one drawing.
 
Hit the town one night and wound up in a club called Dirty where I made a poor attempt to capture some of the goings on in th pretty frenetic environment. Caught a quick silhouette of a patron enjoying one of 2 swings suspended directly over the bar. If you didn’t get stabbed in the ear with a stiletto heel, you might be lucky enough to catch some pocket change in yer martini. Made it over to Hipbone Studios east of the river for some late night nude sketching.
 
The drawing below began with a sketch made of a friend’s kid on the beach at Sawyer, Michigan, and developed over a couple of nights as I stood outside the John Helmon Haberdasher in downtown Portland.
Here’s the view of Chicago Meat, the store on Cicero Ave mentioned in the previous post.
