Sketching in jail

This week I sketched inside a place I never thought I’d be visiting with my sketchbook: a jail.

Kim Bogucki, a local police officer who founded and produces The IF Project (Follow the link and watch the video!) invited the Seattle Urban Sketchers to teach a sketching workshop at the Washington Corrections Center for Women, the main jail for women in the state. About 800 offenders are incarcerated here for all sort of crimes, from drug trafficking leading to several years in prison to homicides that mean life without parole behind bars.

The IF Project has organized writing workshops for the inmates before, so a sketching class seemed a good fit to help the women use their visual creativity. I know sketching can bring a smile to people’s faces. In this case, the smiles were really moving. The women were very sweet and thankful.

About 30 of them took the workshop and shared a lot of laughs sketching blind contours of each other, drawing with their non-dominant hand and finger painting with watercolor. When the two-and-a-half hour session ended, everyone seemed very energized and inspired by the experience. I sure was. See more images from the workshop on our blog at http://seattle.urbansketchers.org/