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.

Spring in Vancouver

How do you know it's spring in Toronto?  The Leafs are out.  Unfortunately, the same applies in Vancouver this year, but here we have another sign - the rain falls on daffodils, not just on mud.  But even raindrops make good sketching subjects if you study them carefully enough.  And the good thing about rain is that it makes it easier to work on Sunday, so that...
...when it's beautifully sunny on Monday, you can go skiing!  (Being self-employed helps there too.)  It was just me, my tele skis and the hopeful but ultimately disappointed ravens on Hollyburn today.  The ravens there fly right up to visitors, yelling "GORP GORP GORP!" - thus the popular name for trail-mix.  I've done so many sketches on Hollyburn now that I could probably put together a 360-degree panorama, or maybe a time-lapse video - watching the snow come and go, the trees grow, die, rot and be replaced, the ravens evolve, the mountains uplift and erode away.

Cherry blossoms

I usually seem to miss cherry-blossom season in Vancouver, because it is also fiscal year-end for those of us dependent on contracts.  But today after pruning trees - a month late or so - I got out to draw a flowering cherry.  I was just thinking that we appreciate cherry blossoms more because they are so important to Japanese people, when a young Japanese man who was probably here "learning English" (a euphemism for "goofing off for a year"), came by, looked at the tree I was drawing for several minutes, took one photo from a very particular location and angle, then headed off.  Shortly after that, another man came up, looked at my drawing and said "Did you just draw that?"  "Yes." Then, pointing to my pen and brush, "With those?"  "Um, yes..."  I think some people are truly surprised to find that people actually make pictures, rather than just clicking a camera or downloading them.  But watching the Japanese student look for several minutes before taking a single photo was also a lesson in picture-making for me.

Edmonton trip vignettes

Another trip to Edmonton, another unexpected view from the octagonal hotel I stay at.  This one shows two amazing features of Edmonton.  One is the vacant lot, which has been that way for at least 5 years.  That would never happen on the busiest commercial street in Vancouver - it would immediately become condominiums, a guerrilla garden or a grow-op.  The other Edmonton phenomenon is the ground-floor store in the building across the road, a cupcake emporium.  People think that oil is the mainstay of the Alberta economy, but actually it is cupcakes.

I had a new little sketchbook.  They always look intimidatingly blank, so I did a lot of little drawings: people on the seabus, skytrain and plane and at the restaurant; Easter "stuff", lounge lizards and even some books at the Chapters on Whyte Avenue; exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta, including some amazing biomorphic very-mixed-media installations by Edmonton artist Lyndal Osborne; an upscale pub; and the trip home.