Draw By Night March: Draw Your Dream Home

The latest Draw By Night meet up in Vancouver went down on Wednesday March 12 at the Vancouver Film School downtown. The theme for the evening was "home sweet home," and we were encouraged to imagine our dream homes - whatever that meant to us.

For those of you not familiar, Draw By Night is a free bi-monthly meet up where people come together to draw, doodle, and create the occasional masterpiece in the company of others. You can bring your own drawing utensils, or use the ones provided at the meet up. The skill levels of those who attend are incredibly varied. I myself am just a doodler, but some of the other people are enormously talented!

Normally I go around the room and snap pictures after completing my own drawing, but this time I only remembered to take photos of mine. Oops! Fortunately, there's a whole Flickr album dedicated to the evening, so if you're interested you can browse some of the talented artists' drawings here.

At first I didn't know what to draw, so I started drawing a shamrock, which turned into this ombre rainbow chain of tiny circles...

The chain eventually turned into a tree, as many of my drawings tend to do...

Inspired by all of the moss that grows in the nooks and crannies of the trees around Vancouver, I added more tiny green circles as moss on my tree... and gave my branch a house swing!

The mountains in the background are inspired by Vancouver too...

I mean, a house swing isn't my "dream home" but it did seem like a fun house...

And jumping from your house swing into a pond below sounds like even more fun, right?

Thanks for checking out my doodles! If you're in the Vancouver area and want to join our little drawing party, follow along with Draw By Night's Facebook page to find out when the next event will be. And if you'd like, you can browse past blogs about Draw By Night events here.

FACEBOOK TWITTER PINTEREST INSTAGRAM

Quick "Draw By Night" Recap: Catnado

Having skipped the bi-monthly Draw By Night event in July (for no good reason, really), by late August it had been awhile since I'd gone to a good old fashioned drawing party. Goodness - I'm just looking back now and realizing the last one I went to was way back in May! Eesh!

I was excited when another DBN was announced a few weeks ago, which I attended in Vancouver on the evening of August 28.

The theme of the evening was Catnado - combining society's apparent obsession with both cats and Sharknado... two bandwagons onto which I've yet to leap. (For the record, I will never like cats. Sharknado is probably good for a laugh, at the very least.) Because of this, my attempts at drawing that night were sort of.... stunted. I was just not inspired!

.  this is supposed to be a cat with a shark fin strapped to his back  .

 I like to think that the cat wearing the tie is stressed out on his way to an important meeting, and the other one is smirking at him like, "OH ARE YOU ON YOUR WAY TO YOUR BIG FANCY MEETING? WORKIN' MAN'S A CHUMP!"

.  you go to your meeting, i'ma get this mouse!  .
.  yolo!  .

 This was the closest I came to including something tornado-related into my doodles:

I drew 3-4 cats - all of them basically the same since I have very little experience even looking at cats at all, let alone drawing different breeds of them.  So I set down my colored pencils and walked around the room to scope out what others were up to....

But by then I was kind of catted out. So while the Draw By Night parties usually last for two hours, I ended up leaving after an hour. Not a disappointing night, by any stretch, but it definitely left me wishing that it wouldn't be another 2 months before the next DBN so I can redeem myself ;) I believe the next one will be a Halloween-themed evening, so I definitely look forward to that!

Did you see Sharknado? Was it as awful as everyone says it is?

Find me on Facebook! ~ Holla @ me on Twitter ~

May's Draw By Night in Vancouver

On May 2 there was another Draw By Night meet up that I had the pleasure of attending. Before a month passes without me posting about it, here's a re-cap:

The theme of the evening was "Memory Theater" and was inspired by performance artist Cian Donnelly, whose work is...... fahkin creepy. Here's the short description of his work that was included on the Draw By Night event post:

"Donnelly's performances are a potent mix of costume, song and spoken word; expect nightmare lyricism and poetic horror."

Yeah. That was accurate. For this Draw By Night, we actually got to watch one of Donnelly's performances via webcam from his studio in Italy. After his terribly creepy performance (some of which you can watch here), he set up his cam (in full costume) to paint and draw along with us. His work reminded me a litttttle bit of artist John Frame, whose work I saw in an exhibit at the Portland Art Gallery last year.

Our drawings were to be loosely inspired by Donnelly's performance and artwork, so that made for some twisted and dark drawings in the room. Here was my doodle:

Then, as usual, I walked around the room and snapped some pictures of the other artists' drawings. And, as usual, they were all vastly superior to my own!

This was my third Draw By Night meet-up since moving here. The group meets bi-monthly in Vancouver, so we'll meet again in July to draw together and chit chat. It's a fun way to meet alllllll sorts of different people!

Check out the Draw By Night Facebook page to stay updated on future events!

Read about other Draw By Nights here:
- March 2013
- January 2013

March's Draw By Night in Vancouver

On the Wednesday before I left for my visit to Massachusetts back in mid-March, I went to my second Draw By Night event in Vancouver. Draw By Night is a group I came across on MeetUp.com and it meets once every two months to simply draw together around Vancouver. Both times I've gone, it's been hosted in the Vancouver Film School building downtown.

The theme for the March 16th Draw By Night was "The Profound Squonzeling" (??) and we'd all be drawing "fictional medical diagrams and fantastical anatomy charts," which would sort of tie in with the animated film project of the evening's guest artist, James Braithwaite. James joined us via Skype on a big projection screen at the front of the room, so he was drawing with us the entire time as well.

People can bring their own materials or use the markers provided instead. Every table is covered with big rolls of white paper, so everyone is free to take a seat wherever and then just begin drawing right on the paper tablecloth. At the end of the night, you can either leave your drawing (as most do) or rip it off and take it with you.

There were probably about 50 people there this time - a bit fewer than the first one I went to in January, which had 70-80 people in attendance. Food and snacks and coffee were also provided!

I had a really nice time chatting with the people around me, and it was once again really incredible to see the kinds of creative things that the talented people in the room were drawing. I took several pics of my own doodle, but failed to take any once it was all actually finished. Below are some photos of my drawing, mid-progress:

I walked around the room to capture some of the others' work, too:  

.  please forgive the camera shadow  .

.  i imagine this one having a very peculiar voice  .

They obviously all make my picture look like it was drawn by a first grader, but that's fine by me. I've always enjoyed drawing and coloring - the fact that a bunch of adults (and a few kids too!) are all getting together to do just that... well it's pretty sweet, hmm?

You can view a few more pictures, as well as a more official write-up of the night, here: Draw By Night #28 The Profound Squonzeling 

I assume the next meet up of Draw By Night will happen sometime in May, since it meets every two months. Whenever it is, I look forward to it and will definitely be there! You should come too :)

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!