Seattle sketchcrawl at the Ballard Locks

After my week at the sketching workshop in Jaca (Spain), I’m back to drawing with my Seattle peeps.

Eight of us met today here to observe global SketchCrawl day. We went to the Ballard Locks, a “mini” Panama Canal that connects the Puget Sound with Lake Union and Lake Washington. It was built in the 1910s and the engineers were really smart to build a fish ladder so the salmon in the salt waters of the Puget Sound would have a way to go upstream to lay their eggs and complete their life cycle.

The fish ladder has a viewing area where you can see the salmon swimming against the current. It’s really interesting. I think only 2 percent of all salmon make it back up the river to where their eggs were hatched. The rest are eaten by other creatures —including us fish meat lovers!— at different points of their journey. What a hard life these fish have. (For a change of pace I used a 2B pencil on this sketch instead of my usual Micron pens.)

See more photos from the day on this flickr set and keep an eye on our USk Seattle blog and the SketchCrawl forum to see everyone’s drawings.