It's been a year since I last visited Chicago, but I was lucky enough to get there before the frigid weather kicked in. While I was waiting for my flight, I saw this gaudy-looking plane come down the runway. Wouldn't you know that it turned into my gate. The flight attendant acted all excited about us getting to ride on one of Southwest's "specialty" planes painted with state flags - evidently, there are only 12 of them. At first, I thought this was a tribute to Florida and their recent hurricane, but I found out this plane was painted in 2010. The reason they don't have 50 planes with state flags is they only go to the trouble when a plane is badly in need of a new paint job.
I picked the date for this visit specifically so Courtney and I could go to the sketchout at Sketchbook Brewery. The Chicago urban sketchers usually hold one of their meetups at Sketchbook Brewery about 2-3 times a year and it always looked like fun (plus they have good beer you can drink while sketching).
One of the members gave a demo on shading - mostly with a pen or pencil. Since we were doing watercolor sketches, we didn't pay much attention. But I painted the lady with the multi-colored shirt and the man with the baseball hat in my picture. It's much easier to paint people when you don't have to do their faces.
The next day Courtney and I met up with the urban sketchers again at Calgary Cemetery in Evanston. It was a sunny day, but the wind coming off the lake was pretty chilly. Courtney must be used to it, though, because she only wore a short-sleeved t-shirt (I was wearing my sweatshirt over a long-sleeved shirt!).
Afterwards, we stopped off at a new Empanada restaurant for dinner. I had to laugh, because Uptown is mostly known for their Asian restaurants, so this owner was pretty brave to buck tradition with his Argentinian-fare.
In the meantime, Bruce stayed home doing some more house projects. This time he put together a storage cubby and a media unit for the basement. The nice thing about IKEA is you can usually fit their merchandise in your car. The bad thing is you have to put it together yourself.
