Oregon Historical Society- sketching visit

On this past cold and windy day in Portland I decided to visit the Oregon Historical Society. I had heard that there was a display of SantaLand items and thought that might be interesting.

Now, I am immigrant from the east coast, so I was not familiar with what Santaland was. It turns out that for many years the Meier and Frank company had this animated holiday  display...at one time it took up a whole floor of the downtown store. Over the years it was compressed to smaller spaces and eventually disbanded.

The display that I saw was pretty small. A volunteer there said that mostly it was due to the extremely poor condition of most of the items when the historical society took possession of them.
What I saw was the Santa chair, Rudolf, tree, wreath, and three elves. The sort of train thing behind the elves is supposed to be a model of a monorail that had been part of the original Meier and Frank display.

I originally worked this up in pen but was dissatisfied with the black and grey tones so decided to do it up in Gouache when I got home.

I walked around a bit at the other displays and settled on this other display to sketch.

 

And just to round out this report of my sketching day is my beginning sketch done from the Behind the Museum Cafe....a view out the window.

 

#usk10x10Portland Vignettes at the Oregon Historic Society

Kitchen implements brought to Oregon by settlers in the 1800's

Display of stuffed beaver, bird and various old Oregon items

Glenn talking about vignettes.

Downtown

I thought I'd post a couple of recent sketches from downtown Portland. 

These were done from the patio of the Oregon Historical Society. The top one shows the Tom Hardy sculpture, 'Flying Together' and the next shows a north view, looking toward the side of the First Congregational Church. The crane in the background is near Directors Square. It seems almost everywhere I look downtown I see that crane.