December 14 was the last Vancouver Urban Sketchers meeting before Christmas, and I made an 8-hour sketching session out of it. Well, almost, there was some socializing too.
From 2 – 5 pm, 20(!) of us sketchers met at 33 Acres Brewing Company. They have a tasting room where they are allowed to sell glasses and growlers of their own beer, but no other alcohol or cooked foods. These urban breweries with their own tasting rooms are filling some kind of thirst in Vancouver as well as a loophole in the Byzantine liquor laws that we enjoy here in BC. These laws are finally under review.
The “no cooked food” restriction is elegantly circumvented by allowing food trucks (also relatively new to Vancouver) to park outside these tasting rooms. These food trucks do not have a liquor license. A nice symbiotic relationship results between two BC-bureaucracy-crippled businesses.
We had a visiting Urban Sketcher from Australia along, Evelyn Yee. She made the suggestion that we draw quick, 5-minute portraits of each other on small, business-card-sized pieces of paper. I think most of us ended up doing that, and it was a lot of fun. The beer may have helped too.
Sketches of Evelyn by various sketchers (the brightly coloured one at top left is by me — I created watercolour washes on small pieces of paper in advance.
Sketches of me by various sketchers.
At 5 pm, everyone took off, and Evelyn and I walked up and down Main Street in search of another warm place to hang out and sketch. We moved along to a Bean Around the World coffee shop, drew there until they closed at 8 pm, and then went to the Rocky Mountain Flatbread Company for pizza until they closed at 10 pm.
On the way I showed Evelyn one of my favourite stores on Main Street, The Regional Assembly of Text. We had a great time talking and connecting over sketching, and the next day she had to catch a flight home to Melbourne.
