Urban Sketcher

Posted on Mar 19, 2013 in Vancouver | 0 comments

This is a new cafe, SweetSalt, in my neighborhood that bills itself as a “German bakery” and “family-friendly” — there is a play area for kids and a mostly white interior with white-painted wooden chairs. Definitely appealing to women with or without babies, and to men whose love of pastries is greater than their fear of estrogen.

I am definitely in the correct hormonal target market. It was my first visit. I had a very good Americano here this morning and a pumpkin seed bun with butter and jam. The bun wasn’t at all like a German “Brötchen” though, which are fluffy-doughy, almost like a baguette. My German heart leapt when I first saw it, but then it turned out to be the dense consistency of a mini-loaf of bread. But it tasted good nonetheless.

The great thing and I suppose the bad thing about my neighborhood is that it’s rapidly gentrifying. Yoga studios, hair dressers, restaurants, and coffee shops are popping up all over the place, and sometimes they close again quickly. I know it’s a tough market, so I really hope this new cafe survives for as long as the owners are up for running it.

Posted on Mar 18, 2013 in Vancouver | 0 comments

It’s a good weekend for me when I do two sketches. On Saturday morning, I had a massage and then a coffee and croissant at the Wicked Cafe where I did a quick (for me) 30-minute sketch.

On Sunday, I had set up a sketch outing for my new Meetup group in Gastown. It was also St. Patrick’s Day and we have a parade here in Vancouver which passed by near our meeting place. We also got to hear bagpipe music and a live band in a nearby pub. 11 people, including myself, came out to sketch and afterwards nine of us went into a restaurant/bar where several of us celebrated the occasion with a pint of Guinness. I wore a green tuque, and in honour of the day I adjusted the colour of the sky in my sketch ;).

Posted on Mar 4, 2013 in Vancouver | 2 comments

Exciting things are happening! I was so inspired by my Berlin stay and meeting the Berlin Urban Sketchers, that I vowed to finally take some steps to find and meet other urban sketchers upon my return to Vancouver.

First of all, I applied for a separate Vancouver Urban Sketchers blog by finding a few other urban sketchers from Vancouver at urbansketchers.org where I am also a member. There were only about 5 of them, and they were all enthusiastic about applying to get a blog set up by the mothership, urbansketchers.org. We submitted an application and the main committee will decide very soon whether we in Vancouver are pumped enough to do this 😉

But meanwhile, I want to get the word out to more people about urban sketching and hopefully find even more sketchers who might want to share their work in this upcoming Vancouver-only urban sketching blog. So on February 17th, I started a Meetup Group to gather the urban sketchers of Vancouver together. It’s only been two weeks, but 53 people have already signed up for my new group, and today about a dozen of them came out to meet for a sketching session that I set up at the Vancouver Pacific Central Station. I was amazed that all these nice people showed up and were eager to sketch together! I finally got to meet Don who has been my Flickr friend for a few years and sketch with him. Check out Don’s sketching blog. At the end we all met up again to show each other our sketches and then called it a day.

Another boost for the urban sketching community may come from a conference of BC Landscape Architects in late April, where I’ve been asked to present a workshop on urban sketching together with Matthew, a Victoria-based urban sketcher. Landscape architects are likely to be drawing frequently anyway and with all their knowledge of drawing, plants, and architecture could be very enriching to us other urban sketchers. So my not-so-secret hope is that they will have so much fun at our upcoming workshop that they will get hooked on this activity and show up for future sketching sessions in droves.

I feel like I am spreading a new religion, but no worries, it’s just urban sketching. I swear it on my moleskine.

Posted on Feb 22, 2013 in Vancouver | 1 comment

I had just arrived back in Vancouver on Thursday February 14, spent the weekend getting over my jetlag and was looking forward to a quiet week of catching up in my office when on Monday February 18 I got a call from the college where I’m signed up to teach as a substitute. They asked me to come in to teach, and I said yes.

So I’ve had no time for a new sketch this week but I am posting the gorgeous view from the window of my classroom which I drew last year.