Lonsdale: Rain, sleet, fog, snow and latte

Neither snow nor rain nor sleet... the mail gets through, and Lonsdale blocks get sketched.  I started the cheery older apartment block at 6th and Lonsdale in a patch of sunlight, but by the time I was done an hour later, I was bent over the page trying to shelter it from cold blowing rain.  When my random-number generator sent me up towards the top of the hill, I disappeared into fog and sleet, and had to do the sketch "Montreal style" (from inside my car).  A couple days later I was back to the very top block on a cold clear morning with thick snow on the trees just a bit further up - I'd thought to bring a thermos of hot water, not for me, but to do the watercolours before they froze.  Then the fourth block of the set, done under exceedingly challenging conditions - trying to sketch while drinking a latte and eating a chocolate-chip muffin in a conveniently located cafe...

Anita Wigl'it at Dr Sketchy's

Shari Contrary scours the world to bring the best to Dr. Sketchy's.  This week's model, Anita Wigl'it, the internationally renowned drag queen from New Zealand, was head-and-shoulders above the others.  Literally - she's* about 6' 5", before the heels.  She had great costumes, an exuberant lip-sync show, and was kind enough to award me one of the coveted Dr Sketchy pencils.  What could be better?  The only downside was that, in a fit of exuberance and stunning clutziness, I flung my entire jar of black ink onto the floor and spent the rest of the night on my hands and knees cleaning.  (Thanks to Sigrid for her help during that emergency, and the owners of the Cottage Bistro for being much calmer than I would have been if someone was wrecking my restaurant).  I might be demoted back to pencil drawing for a while...
* This being a somewhat new cultural experience for me, I wasn't sure what pronoun to use for a drag queen.  So I asked.  "She" is the correct choice.  So now you know too.

Cafe Calabria

The Urbansketchers started the year with a full-scale invasion of Cafe Calabria on Commercial Drive.  It's a great sketching place, not to mention a great cafe, full of classical sculptures, European decor, cherubs painted on the ceiling, and (oddly?) Flesh Gordon posters.  Unforgettable music too ("When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore"  Now it's stuck in your head too).  And great characters - the fellow in the portrait was perhaps not thrilled that I kept looking at him to draw, but that's not a rude hand gesture - he wouldn't hold his hand still, so I tried to draw it after he'd left and it didn't quite turn out right...

Hollyburn sleeping tree, sleeping cabin

Like bears, mountain hemlock trees sleep through the winter.  With 2 to 3 meters of snow already, little hemlocks are buried, and the big ones stand dozing stoically with their branches held in close by the snow.  But it's the adolescent ones that are the most entertaining.  The first snow of the year bends their flexible top over.  The next snow bends them a little further down.  Heavier and heavier snows later bend the whole thin trunk, so they look like they are napping with their head hung way down.  Sometimes they'll curl completely around, like the one outside our cabin.  When the snow melts and falls off, they pop part way back up, then fully unfurl themselves in the spring.

Some cabins also look like they are sleeping, under an enormous down comforter of snow.

Bluebird day

Clear sunny skies with fresh powder snow on the mountains - we don't get a lot of these bluebird days in Vancouver.  And we don't get any at all if we stay at work when they happen.  So I took the opportunity to carve some telemark turns on Hollyburn - flawless ones, I might add, which also means "timid".  And, of course, to work on my icecolour painting.  Connoisseurs of the genre will recognize the tell-tale features: blotchy washes, pale colours because the brushes have frozen, blobs of dark colour where ice-paint flakes ended up, and feathery lines of frost crystals.  And subject matter that usually involves snow, mountains or snowy mountains.

Life, exaggerated

Me, exaggerate?  Never in a hundred million billion years would I exaggerate a life drawing.

Portrait and party

Alain Boullard came up with a brilliant idea for a drawing session: an hour and a half of portrait drawing, followed by another hour and a half drawing a blue-grass band in full twang.  The brilliance is the yin-yanginess of it.  Portrait drawing is intense, artists packed close together staring intently at another person's face while struggling to get something respectably human-looking on the paper.  I tend to end up holding my shoulders somewhere above my ears and forgetting to breathe until I notice my drawing hand turning blue.  And then, faster than you can say yippee-ei-o, a change to the complete other end of the looseness spectrum, with The Soots, a duo playing fantastic foot-stomping blue grass.  I have a bit of a different drawing style when I'm dancing, and breathing...