Garden in the Sun

What a beautiful day!  Sunny and warm.  I checked that Soos Creek Botanical Garden is now open for the year again.   It's not very far from my home and a beautiful place to sketch with several different garden environments.  It's just a bit north of Pierce County. 

I had intended to sketch a sculptural fence I'd seen there last time but it was gone.  So I sketched a small bridge and then a large bell.





On my way home, I stopped at my favorite view point for Mt. Rainier and did another sketch.

Finding Beauty 'In-Between'

When I was in Kindergarten I was given a boxy, plastic device called a View-Master, along with some white cardboard disks that had tiny squares of film around their edges. I would put one of the ‘reels’ into the slot on top, look into the eye-hole lenses, push down the lever on the side…and, Oh My! I would see beautiful, blazing-with-color 3-D scenes of wild flowers in mountain meadows. The context: This was before TV, and, our Brownie Box Camera took black and white pictures. Since that gift, I’ve loved watching for special views through ‘apertures’…like a  garden seen between two broken fence slats,  a carnival parade between two buildings, a school of minnows between two lily pads.

 So, this morning…I wasn’t disappointed when I learned I couldn’t go to the beach edge due to private property ownership issues. A very nice person let me sit on his porch to sketch, and, poor me: I had to peek between his and his neighbor’s roofs to see ‘the scene.’ My original color in the sketches looked ‘regular’…so, I gave them both another dose of pigment, and enjoyed a blazing fond memory of my old View-Master.  Strathmore sketch pad-Toned Tan. 01, 03 Micron pens. Prismacolor pencils.