Meet the correspondents: SEATTLE > Gabi Campanario

“I was a teenager when I became really interested in drawing. At 16, I did a series of sketches at my parents’ hometown near Seville in southern Spain — drawings of the crumbling castle and the whitewashed houses in the village — that I was particularly proud of.

You’d think I would have gone to art school in college to further my passion for art, but I went to journalism school instead to satisfy the news junkie in me.

A lot of years passed without drawing on location very often. But since moving to Seattle a couple of years ago I seem to have found the way to that intersection where journalism and art meet.

This is a city of both tough fishermen and coffee connoisseurs, Boeing machinists and Microsoft programmers. Its unique geographic setting with water and mountains east and west creates an interesting backdrop to the urban landscape. I try to capture all of that in my sketchbooks, drawing every day on the bus, during lunch breaks or on weekend outings to the beautiful places of the Pacific Northwest. Labeling things and writing observations around the drawings is the type of journalism that suits me.”

• Gabi’s blog.
• Gabi’s blog at The Seattle Times: Seattle Sketcher.
• Gabi’s art on Flickr.