Captured this sunny moment at Snoqualmie Falls last Tuesday, June 25.

Ever since my college days in the late 70's when I took a quarter of Pacific Northwest Native Art, the Tlingit origin story of the Raven Who Stole the Sun has delighted me with it's characterization of Raven and his cleverness and how different versions of the tale add bits of "information" about why Raven is black and why his voice is so unpleasant.  My quarter project was a traditional painting of a bird stealing the sun, but I added flukes instead of tailfeathers and called it The Seahawk Who Stole the Sun.    

 

 

Classic native images usually depict the sun as a little red ball, as in this drumhead:

 

 

But I always thought it would be fun to show the sun a little more like it actually looks in space, with a defiant Raven showing it off in his wide open beak.  Hence today's fun artwork.

 

Since late September 2023, I've been hooked on pastel painting, creating at least 3 per week since then, most in less than a few hours.  So much fun.  But we planned a 3-week trip on the Holland America Oosterdam starting on March 5 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, sailing around Cape Horn in about three weeks, and disembarking in Santiago, Chile.  Didn't want to take my large tray of pastels, so I opted for a bunch of pastel pencils and a couple Pastelmat pads with glassine between the sheets.  Hopefully that would tide me over until my return to the full studio.

 

My first attempt was the view from our 7th floor Veranda of the Buenos Aires shipping port was pretty geometric.

 

Very different using pencils compared to full size hunks of pastels.  Everything is a lot more "strokey."  A couple days later in Montevideo I caught this view of a small number of fishing vessels that were part of a much larger fleet, all with matching red hulls.

 

Also in Montevideo, a very goofy looking skyscraper built by a couple of Italian brothers who made their fortune selling clothing on the streets caught my eye.  It was built in 1929 and for many years was the tallest building in South America.

 

After two full days at sea, we docked in the Falkland Islands at Port Stanley, where the British possession still has working phone booths all over town!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We took an all-day four-wheeling adventure to Seal Point and got acquainted with four of the five penguin species on the island; the Rock-Hoppers, the Magellanic, the Gentoos, and here is Marcelle visiting with the Three Kings (it's a photo, not a painting):

Then we entered the Straight of Magellan and tendered in to Punta Arenas, where the Lord Lonsdale hulk of a ship sits on the shore just south of the downtown area, a monument to all fallen sailors.  I did an underpainting with watercolor on this one before doing the pencils because the paper was pure white; I think it helped.

  

The following morning on the way to Ushuaia, the southernmost town in the world, we passed five glaciers at dawn; I captured the 1,400-foot-tall Italia glacier in this pastel-pencil sketch:

  

So now we're in the middle of three days at sea on our way to Puerto Montt, much closer to the Equator and a lot warmer than these icy climes.  Getting a bit used to these pencils, but they're very different than the full size chunks I'm used to.  And I'm running out of black and white pencils!