This morning Benjamin and I went for our first Seattle Urban Sketchers meetup. We met at Sakya Tibetan Monastery and fanned out through the neighborhood to sketch, on-location, for 2.5 hours. Afterwards we met up for the ‘throw-down’ where we all set out our sketchbooks for each other to peruse.
Trees being a great interest of mine, I noticed these four large beauties filled with prayer flags and stationed myself on the side of the monastery.
I started out too tight and controlling, so I attempted to loosen my strokes and then got too carried away on my first tree. By then I felt committed to keeping the style throughout the other trees. I didn’t know how to change course midstream. So they are way overdone and I’m not really pleased with them at all. But I love how the flags turned out and how they wind through the trees. I’m also really proud of some of my shrubs and included a detail shot of them. My cars are quirky, but you know, I ended up liking their stylized look!
I didn’t quite get all the color in I wanted (although the tree trunks really were white, isn’t that lovely?) but I got close. The sides of my work were a disaster so I admit this is a cropped version. I didn’t have a good plan for how to frame my image and was taking the Urban Sketch Manifesto WAY too literally (about needing to show all of the surrounding context in your drawing), but I learned a lot from this experience.
The throw-down gave this introvert all kinds of insecurity. I don’t like unstructured new social situations anyway and it was even worse because I felt so vulnerable having people look at my art next to everyone else’s who all have more experience than me. I went into full-chameleon survival mode and waited for it to pass and left as soon as it was over. Then I went and sat in the car and had a vulnerability hangover and cried big fat tears over my feelings of vulnerability, inadequacy, and discouragement. Benjamin was encouraging and supportive but I still couldn’t feel better. So I put on Mac Davis’ ‘Lord It’s Hard to Be Humble When You’re Perfect In Every Way’ and turned it up and sang it loud. And that helped. Fake it ‘till you make it, right?
Most of all I’m just proud I went and that I’ve done my first on-site sketch.
