The St. Pete Crawl

YAY! The St. Pete Crawl was a success, and a lot of fun for the folks that made it out for the evening. A big thanks goes out to both Chris Jenkins, St. Pete artist and resident whose blog is here, and the lovely Jo Ellen Schilke at the funkadelic Globe Coffee Lounge for making the arrangements and setting it all up for us to enjoy.

I headed down to downtown St. Pete with my 11-year-old daughter, Kayli, and we had a nice time catching up with the other folks who came out for the crawl, as well as -of course- drawing!

A good friend of mine, artist Brian Young-who co-created the Peace Be Still mural with me at Unity Church of Palm Harbor- came down with his daughter Kelly, who is an amazing talent, and Kayli and I had fun sketching in fairly close proximity to them all evening.

Kelly and Kayli persuaded us to try out the somewhat locally famous "red chairs" for size. Artist Douglas Kornfeld created these whimsical interactive sculptures which are located in the lawn of the St Petersburg Judicial center at 545 First Avenue North. The piece is titled Face the Jury. Here are some pics of Brian and the girls in the red chairs.... Kayli mentioned that she had always wanted to climb up on them, so I am glad we had some part in helping her achieve one of her stepping-stone goals in life. Just one more fun "to do" we could help her check off her quite-long list.

I seemed to be more into chatting with the other artists and dreaming about my upcoming trip to New York then drawing, but I managed to squeak these two spreads out during the crawl.

I know that I will drawing and painting my brains out for one glorious week beginning tomorrow, so I didn't worry that I lacked focus. More on my NY trip in the next post...

I tried to manage a few quick sketches while in the Globe, but I was distracted and my subjects were moving, of course. I just didn't feel up to the challenge of working too hard on them, so we moved on down the street after Kelly finished her coffee.

I settled in at the old Post Office, an open-air portico surrounding the post office building. This building has a lot of architectural detail- some tiling and ornate columns. I worked on capturing a bit of the detail, but again, being distracted by my thoughts, I didn't get into it too heartily.

We then moved on to the Mirror Lake area, where I settled down on the lawn in front of the Library. I worked a little on the building and also the statue that was out in front.

The sun was starting to go down and our stomachs were starting to grumble, so we got up and headed back to the Globe for a bite to eat. I had the Eggplant Parmesan wrap and Kayli had the Veggie Quiche- both good and affordable too. With our drinks, we spent only about $13 bucks total for dinner. Hooray for the Globe, still offering eats that don't break the bank.

With our sketchbooks in hand, we left the Globe to head back up to north Pinellas. The crawl was good, and we look forward to the next one! Y'all should think about coming on out for the next one we do. Keep posted, we'll announce something soon for September.