Last week, I had to the opportunity to join 3 other artists at the Northwest Watercolor Society’s annual SPLASH event held at the Daniel Smith mothership store here in Seattle. It’s a great event, around 200 people showed up to sample wares from vendors and to watch 4 of us do demo paintings.
Joining me were Catherine Gill, Katherine Wright, and Denise Le Blanc. We were each given the same photo to use as reference, and we had only ONE HOUR to paint! It was like running a sprint! No time to think or strategize much (except for those smart folks who practiced ahead of time — alas, I am not one of those.)
Here is the image we were given:
We did get to sketch in the linework before the hour started. When I arrived and saw the others already set up, I could see how they had cropped the image, so to be different, I decided to use the whole image 😉
I had sketchbooks strewn around my table, so lots of people were coming up and flipping through them, asking questions, and watching me and all of us work. We were painting so fast, it was at times challenging to talk and paint at the same time.
At the end of our sprint, it was amazing to see the results. Each of us took the exact same photo and interpreted it in incredibly different ways! This is something I love about artists and Urban Sketchers too. You can literally have 30 people sketching the same spot and each one sketches something different.
Here are the final four…pretty different from the photo, I’d say!! In order left to right are Catherine Gill (watercolor and pastel) – Denise LeBlanc (acrylic) – Katherine Wright (watercolor) – me (pencil and watercolor) on the far right. Due to the time limitation and my sketchbook ways, I opted to do a smaller painting. And let’s not get into how I dislike working from photos!!!
It was really great fun! Thank you to Dolores Marquez for organizing and to the NWWS for this opportunity!
And darn it, I probably could have sold 50 books that night, but the Daniel Smith store has sold out, and the publisher is sold out too!!!! That’s both bad news and good news. Another printing has already been ordered–yay! Luckily, copies are still available online and in some stores.
Drawing Perspectives 