We had a Vancouver Urban Sketchers meetup here on February 8. I am not sure whether this drawing qualifies as a horizontal or vertical panorama, since I pretty much put the horizon line on a 45 degree angle. It could go either way.
I finally got around to adding some colour back into my sketches. Still, most of my January and February drawings remained black and white.
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This was another great model, except the noisy soundtrack of some kind of Pulp Fiction type movie drove me crazy.
While I was focusing on getting her body drawn correctly, the chair back turned out weird. Drawing is like one big, vague puzzle. When you’re done, you hope it all fits properly, but it often doesn’t. It seems that you have to keep an eye on everything at once. That’s why quick gesture and proportion drawings are good. I could also try using a pencil first, but I don’t want to give myself the option of being tentative. With a pencil and an eraser, I would allow myself way too many “undos”. Question your drawing less = draw more.
My favourite part of this sketch are her hands.
Read MoreOn February 2, we had another meetup prior to Dr. Sketchy: the last day of the Charles Edenshaw exhibit at the VAG. I used the simple “Paper” app on the iPad for these drawings.
We spent one week in Mexico with friends in late January in a resort south of Cancun. I think I mostly caught up on sleep, which was great.
The drawing above is of a dive bar in Playa Del Carmen. I am not sure it was really a dive bar, maybe it was just a bar made to look dive-y, but it was half a block away from the 5th Avenue shopping strip. What I liked were the cheap white plastic tables and chairs, and the two swings hanging from the ceiling in front of the bar. Jeff and G. played cards, while L. modelled for me on the swing.
This pool-side drawing remained unfinished because it started raining while I was drawing this on our first day and didn’t stop much for three days. That was fine, but I never returned to this drawing. Now I like it; the edge of the pool trailing off into infinity. You just have to imagine the whole right-hand page there.
Again, no colour due to time constraints, although it’s a pity to not use colour while in Mexico.
I also painted 10 very colourful watercolour postcards which I mailed out. The paintings are mostly variations of palm trees. I was told at the resort that they will take up to three months to arrive at their destinations. Makes me think they’re personally walking them over to Canada.
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On January 18, about 20 of us urban sketchers met at the Granville Island Public Market and spread out to draw on Granville Island. About 7 or 8 of us walked over to the Net Loft and took over yet another unsuspecting coffee shop.
I can’t seem to get around to adding colour these days, either I am too slow or chatting too much.
Afterwards, we had fun showing each other our drawings outside behind the market.
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Lobby of the Pan Pacific Hotel
Lobby of the Convention Centre East
The challenge in setting up sketching sessions in the winter months for my meetup group is to find sheltered, heated public locations with bathrooms, accessible by public transit, and something interesting to draw. Museums are great, but they’re not free. So I try to vary it.
Still, this time my plan looked like a wash; the Convention Centre West, where I wanted to draw on January 11, was closed for a private function. But we walked over to Canada Place, which now houses the Convention Centre East, and drew there. It’s best to stay flexible when you’re a sketcher. If you can’t draw the thing you planned on, you can always draw something else.
After going through all the seasons in one full year with the Vancouver Urban Sketchers, we now have a good library of sketching locations at our fingertips.
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I need to go back in time a bit: On January 5, we had the biggest ever meetup of the Vancouver Urban Sketchers. Over 50 people signed up, and I think 45 of them actually came! Luckily, I had picked the downtown main branch of the Public Library, a cavernous building which can easily absorb that amount of sketchers without sustaining structural damage.
We spread out and drew up a storm, then invaded a coffee shop to show each other our drawings. I think the large crowd was due to a bit of a New Year’s resolution factor, as in “this is the year I will finally get back into drawing and spend less time exercising.”
Although when I told this to a friend of mine, she said “I would never make that resolution. In fact, I’ve decided not to draw this year at all.” And it’s true, she never draws.
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The Vancouver Courier article from January 22, 2014 about urban sketching.
I was out of town for a week’s vacation, but was interviewed by the Vancouver Courier just before I left, and interviewed right after my return, today, by a local radio station, Co-op Radio.
The Vancouver courier interview, conducted by Cheryl Rossi, resulted in this article, Sketch and the city. I am content with it, in spite of its title (I am so not a Sex and the City fan), and am pleased that there seem to be no factual errors.
The interview on Co-op Radio of Christopher Levenson, Peter Braune and Sigrid Albert (that’s me), conducted by R.C. Weslowski and Pamela Bentley, can be found as a segment of their regular show Wax Poetic. But it’s not edited down from the 62-minute hour block to the 27-minute interview. So you can also just listen to the edited 27-minute segment right here.
Read MoreThe etchings all started as urban sketches at each location referenced by the corresponding poem. I had a fun time inviting my urban sketchers meetup group to draw the places with me that I had chosen to illustrate.
Once I started etching, I realized that I didn’t need to, nor want to create the draft sketches in great detail. I prefer to work out the details straight on the copper plate, rather than copy everything over from an “original”. Copying would remove the possibility of letting things happen as I respond to the medium. However, I did want the images to be recognizable as Vancouver scenery. So I used my ability to draw realistically, but threw in some visual reminders that these are drawings, and are not trying to imitate photography.
I used my location sketches as the main reference to create the perspective and narrow compositions; I prefer the wonky perspective that results from the communication between my eyes, brain and drawing hand, to the seemingly “perfect” perspective resulting from a photo, which often looks too flat, and is not even close to what my eye sees. While I used photos as reference material as well, they mainly helped me fill in details and shading. Here are some of these quick sketches:
Below are all nine etchings I made for Getting to Know You by the poet Christopher Levenson. These images are from state proofs, a couple of the copper plates will have slight touchups that were not yet done here. Click on each image to see an even larger resolution version. The project is explained in detail in this earlier post. And you can still pre-order a book here.
2013 has been one of the best years of my life. This copper etching project did it; that, and the Vancouver urban sketchers! I can only hope that 2014 will be as wonderful.
