Oakland Museum of California, 02/26/2017

Every month, John Muir Laws organizes a sketching field trip for the SF Bay Area's Nature Journal Club. This time, thanks to an errant weather forecast, he ended up moving it indoors and we checked out the recently renovated Galley of California Natural Sciences at the Oakland Museum of California. Dioramas galore!

First we had to run the gantlet of admission. It happened to be the final day of the museum's "Black Panthers at 50" exhibit, and the crowd was immense!

And then, the exhibits. The gallery is organized into seven different California regions, and I attempted to document them all! No color media are permitted in the gallery, so welcome to my monochrome wonderland.

No Ban No Wall Rally, 02/04/2017

As usual, I have a ton of art stuff to catch up on posting here. Just for variety, I'll go backwards from the most recent batch. Here are some sketches from the recent "No Ban No Wall" rally in San Francisco's Civic Center plaza...

 Warming up with Laurie and friends before the rally. This is how us sketchers limber up!

Some scene-setting crowd shots. The giant lanterns are an installation by Hong Kong artist Freeman Lau for Chinese New Year.

Getting a bit more up close and personal as the rally winds up. I think these kinds of rallies aren't as lively as marches, because you're basically just standing around listening to people speechify, but it's always interesting to observe the mix of attendees and their homemade signs.