Start of fall

I have a little sketchbook where I do a drawing-a-day-almost.  Here's a page with 3 days from the end of summer to the start of fall: the grapes are ripe, one last red flower from the summer, and a windy break in the first fall storm.  If I'd drawn faster, I could have caught the neighbour's lawn chair sailing into the back lane.

A gritty nude

This is my best painting so far on sandpaper.  OK, it's also my only painting so far on sandpaper, but it's a promising medium.  The idea came about when drawing-friend Sigrid starting drawing on wood veneer, which she got as an assorted box of scraps from Lee Valley.  That reminded of the 10 pound box of random sandpaper bits that I got there 5 years ago, which I've been going through at the rate of about 0.01 pounds per year (it's high-quality industrial stuff, and doesn't wear out).  After a bit of experiment, I found a technique: I put down areas of white gouache, rub Inktense blocks on the rough sandpaper, then mix the two with a damp brush.  It feels a lot like oil paint, except that I can also remove colour easily.  I haven't liked the Inktense sticks on paper, but they're great on the rough surface, bursting into colour when I add water.  It's fun for capturing shorter poses like this when my charcoal isn't co-operating, and may be a nice change from pen-and-watercolour for sketching.

Ocean cement

Ocean Cement has been operating out of Granville Island since 1917, and they are still going strong.  It's a prime spot, right by downtown - within concrete-setting-time distance - and it's on the water to get materials easily.  It helps keep the area with the market, art school and all the studios a bit more real than they might otherwise be.  Plus they paint the cement trucks with funky designs.  I saw one that was painted as a pickle today.

I was drawing there with the urban-sketchers meetup group, because the mobile park-in-a-dumpster that we call home-away-from-home was parked outside Emily Carr University.  But I think "They" have realized how seditious a public drawing group is, because I noticed a sinister looking agent in camouflage-orange observing us carefully from behind the foliage on a nearby balcony.

Marilyn at Dr Sketchy's

Marilyn Monroe was at Dr. Sketchy's in Vancouver last night.  In case you were wondering where she's been all these years.  And still looking great.  Mind you, most of my drawings looked more like Norma Jeane than Marilyn.  I blame that on the heat - a small cafe with a lot of people, not to mention spot lights, on a warm Vancouver night is very hot.  But some like it that way.

Gambier Island

We spent the long weekend on Gambier Island, with a few of the in-laws and friends - say, 50 of them or so, many under the age of 13.  There was a bit of pandemonium, not to mention 5 meals a day, so it was nice to escape periodically to draw.  The government wharf on the island was covered in boys doing things that I thought boys weren't allowed to do any more - climbing pilings, jumping off them into the shallow water at low tide, hanging over the side on rusty chains.  Then a mother showed up - not to chastise them, but to bring them lunch, then let them continue being boys.  That was nice to see.  It's a scenic place, from Halkett Bay, a marine park, to Two-and-a-Half-Tree Island just off the cabin's dock.  There were visits from seals, sea lions, a dolphin and lion's mane jellyfish (tough luck about the arm, Mike - it'll grow back). It's also a damp place, which is good for intertidal life, not so good for camping equipment.

Loutet Farm and Strathcona Garden events

There's more than planting, weeding and harvesting in the gardens around here.  Last night was the volunteers' dinner for the Edible Garden Project at Loutet Farm, our highly successful just-down-the-street urban farm.  A hundred people or so had an amazing potluck dinner out in the fields, followed by a kazoo-playing poetry reading and a square dance (in the parking lot - no lettuces were hurt during this event).  It turned out to be the one typhoon day of the summer, but the canopies did their job and the weather fury held off until it was time to pack up, when it did get a little bit damp.

Before that, we went to an evening of little plays put on by the Environmental Youth Corps in Strathcona Garden, a huge community garden in Vancouver.  The audience walked from garden plot to garden plot, trying, rather unsuccessfully, to connect the theatrical plots, performed by the youth corps people in masks accompanied at times by talking apples.  There was also a large piano in the middle of the garden, which they were quite proud of because they had grown it from seed themselves.

A couple from this week

I have a little mini-sketchbook where I do a drawing a day.  I drew the new mosque while waiting for a switch to be replaced in my car.  I think there's a bylaw in North Vancouver that every house has to have a fence made of pre-fab cedar fence panels from Rona, and that goes for mosques too - but they added cedar 1x2's to make elegant geometric patterns that match the ones on the building.

Today's drawing was from Hollyburn Mountain, where we were picking the astonishing crop of blueberries and huckleberries that have recently appeared, despite a complete lack of rain this summer.