Draw By Night Vancouver

Since moving to Vancouver, I joined Meetup.com to try to find some fun things to do and fun people to do them with. Because I work from home, it's harder for me to make new friends when I move around from place to place. Once I signed up on the site and entered some of my interests, one of the first groups I found was Draw By Night - a bi-monthly meet up group that gets together in different places around Vancouver to just relax, chat and draw. It sounded right up my alley - somewhere to go and be creative with a bunch of other people in a non-threatening environment. They'd even provide the art materials!

My first opportunity to check out the group came on January 9, so I hopped onto a bus with my colored pencils and headed downtown to get my group draw on. All I had was a street address, so I didn't have any idea what exactly I'd be walking into. Would it be a person's apartment with a handful of people there? Would it be a coffee bar with a dozen people? A conference room with one hundred people?

Turns out it was somewhere in between all of that... A spacious cafe that hosts private functions. All of the tables in the place were covered with long strips of big white paper - the kind that comes in huge rolls - and there ended up being about 80 people there throughout the evening. I sat down at a table with two other women and we - and everyone else - just sort of started chatting and doodling. There were tons of markers provided (although I used my colored pencils) and there was a loose theme of "Myth Math" - mashing up monsters and desserts. Random, yes. But it certainly inspired lots of creative drawings. You can view a slideshow of a bunch of examples of things that people drew here:

Draw By Night - January 9, 2013

As you can see, there were some seriously talented artists there!! There were plenty more that weren't included in that slideshow. I like to be crafty and creative, but I am nowhere near as skilled at drawing as many of the people there were. I obviously still had Christmas on the brain, because some of my doodles included a demon candy cane ripping the head off of a snowman and an aggravated Hershey bar stringing helpless M&M lights onto a Christmas tree. I didn't take a picture of what I drew, but next time I'll bring my camera for sure.

It was a really fun forum for meeting random people. I had great conversation with the two other women at my table - Sheryl and Laurel. Both of them were very talented drawers, so it was inspiring to watch what they created. Sheryl is the one who drew the "banana" picture in the aforementioned slideshow, if you noticed it. There was free food provided, and the ages of attendees ranged from 7(ish) to 67(ish). The bulk of the people there were in their 20s. Everyone was free to mill around and grab some food and check out other people's drawings and chat. At the end of the evening, we could either leave our drawings there on the tables (as most everyone did) or rip them off of the larger sheets of paper and take them home.

Going to this event made me wish that there was a Draw By Night to go to every week, but it sadly won't be meeting again until March! Whenever they announce the exact date of the next meet up, it's going directly onto my calendar.

Don't forget to check out the slideshow of drawings here! It'll blow your mind how creative people are!