The weather the last few days has been beautiful, and what better way to celebrate it than spend the morning outside sketching the first flush of cherry blossoms along the waterfront in downtown Portland? I joined Portland's Urban Sketchers and tried my hand at sketching cherry trees against the backdrop of the Steel Bridge.

I'm still learning how to pick out the relevant details from a landscape scene for the sketch, but being around so many talented artists was incredibly inspiring. I finished up with some close up sketches of cherry blossoms, which was so much easier.

Afterwards, a group of us went to see TIm's Vermeer (a very entertaining documentary about an inventor recreating a Vermeer painting), then tried out a neolucida that one of the sketchers had brought along. It felt a little like cheating to trace a sketch from life, but I think I'm going to have to get one. And if Vermeer wasn't above optical assistance, why should I be? Here's a really quick sketch I made using the device.

As I biked home, I started wondering what it would look like to use it for sketching on a curved clay surface....