David and Carolina

No, not a tale of secret romance - two trees on Grand Boulevard.  Carolina is the Carolina silverbell, a lovely little southener covered in white bell-shaped flowers, with large exotic-looking seeds.  I managed not to notice it in the 14 years we have both been living in the neighbourhood.  David, six blocks away, is Davidia involucrata, more commonly - but less elegantly - known as the Kleenex tree.  (Its marketing people try to have it known as the "dove tree", or at least the "handkerchief tree", but everyone not named David calls it the Kleenex tree.)  Both are at their finest now in the middle of spring, ringing their tiny bells or waving their handkerchiefs to each other, forlorn, separated by those six suburban blocks, before tomorrow's rain and the summer's drought wither them away... Maybe it is a secret romance after all?

A tale of two habitats

I did my annual bicycle pilgrimage up the Seymour River on the weekend.  It's the easiest place to ride to to hear blue grouse for my annual non-motorized bird list (birds seen or heard in places you get to from home without involving a motor).  There is also a stand of truly magnificent Sitka spruce trees.  I drew an area of "habitat enhancement" (according to the sign).  It was cold and damp, and downright gloomy, with the only signs of life being two chickadees, a forlorn mallard and one water strider.  It's really meant to be enhancement for salmon and trout fry, and even they were missing from the lifeless black water.  My drawing was quick, because it wasn't a pleasant place to be.  I then moved to a natural side channel on the river, and it was full of creatures: mergansers, rough-winged swallows, band-tailed pigeons, flickers, sapsuckers, several warblers, two vireo species, flycatchers, robins, jays, a kingfisher, two deer, and tracks of a bear and a weasel.  It didn't hurt that the sun finally came out when I was there.  But I think there's a lesson about trying to engineer something like "habitat" that nature is pretty good at making herself.

Recent life drawing

 Here are some life drawings from the last week.  Ones with two legs and no wings are done in water-soluble ink and watercolour, or my usual stand-by of charcoal on mylar.  The other models were not quite as good at holding poses, and were done quickly in permanent ink and watercolour.

Easter at Seton Portage

We spent the Easter weekend at Seton Portage, between Pemberton and Lillooet.  It's hard not to paint the cerulean blue of Seton Lake, especially when you get to stay in a house right where the dark blue river from Anderson Lake enters the much lighter glacial-origin water.  The first drawing was about a 45 minute effort, while the second was about 5 minutes.  The first is more accurate, but I think I prefer the second one.

I also drew the beaver pond in the estuary, mainly for the challenge of practicing the tangle of lighter branches with darker backgrounds - not easy with watercolours and a limited attention span!  I later found one of the former denizens of the beaver pond, making his way back into the soil - or, more likely, into the skull collection of our nephews and nieces...

Eclipse

For those who missed the lunar eclipse early Tuesday morning, here it is.  It was cloudy - as expected in Vancouver - when I first checked, but a strong, warm wind came out of the south and started breaking up the clouds just as the edge of the moon emerged from the Earth's shadow.  The shaded part was still a brownish red, mirroring Mars, which was not too far away in the sky.  It was a memorably surreal scene as the city-lit clouds streamed by.

Davie and Bute

The urbansketcher group met at Davie and Bute in Vancouver.  It's a great place to draw, with the beach nearby, a busy street, some of the big old Vancouver houses a couple blocks away, and some seriously colourful characters.  I drew the Rand house in the Mole Hill area, a lovely 1900 mansion.  It's for sale.  I might buy it, but probably not.  The neighbouring house is also a heritage building, of a more modest scale, but with colourful details.

One small block is closed off at Davie and Bute, and home to a series of picnic tables in all the colours of the rainbow.  A man sitting at the orange table had an orange shirt, orange jacket, orange shorts, orange shoes, orange scarf, orange backpack, orange bag, orange water bottle and orange flowers in an orange vase.  We wondered if he had a similar outfit for the blue table, the purple table...  Or maybe it was just a coincidence?

Sakura festival

I sketched at the Sakura (Japanese: cherry blossom) Festival at van Dusen Gardens today.  As is traditional, it was cold, and it progressed from damp to very damp to downright wet.  I tried Don McNulty's blue-sky trick: paint a blue sky, and suddenly the sky becomes blue.  I'm still waiting.  But there were displays of ikebana and bonsai under shelter, and any number of people with purple or pink hair, so that was all worthwhile.