Vancouver Draw Down 2011

We had a wonderful finale day today, starting out at Sunset Community Centre this morning, winding our way through the city and ending up at Britannia Community Centre's celebration of drawing this afternoon.

Thanks to everyone who came out and drew with us today at each of the nine sites.

We also want to thank our amazing interns: Madeleine, Anita, Natalie, Xiaoyu, Jenny, Chloe, Maegan and Neil. Your energy and enthusiasm were inspiring!

These workshops wouldn't have been possible without the help of our dedicated site liaisons: Cyndy, Ellen, Vivienne, Jill, Marie, Laura, Sindy (and Rika), Jim (and Erin), Manabu and Lorrie. A special thanks to our Park Board pal, Danita... who was always in the right place at the right time!

Here are a few photos from the Sunset Community Centre, the first stop on our day-long finale tour. Check back to this website, our Facebook page and our Flickr photostream for more extensive documentation of this wonderful day of drawing.

Starting first thing tomorrow morning we'll begin travelling across Vancouver, in advance of the start times of each of the nine drop-in workshops that make up our finale. We want to make sure that all of these workshops are set-up and ready to fulfill our goal to encourage people to rediscover the pleasure of drawing, in a non-threatening, social environment.

Each of the participating sites have already received everything they need to present their workshop in their finale kits that were delivered earlier this week. Our wonderful Vancouver Draw Down interns are keen to work with the staff and volunteers at the nine sites to present simple and engaging drawing activities for anyone willing to share a few minutes of their time.

Remember, no drawing skills are needed to participate, just your imagination and sense of fun. So drop by and get drawn in!

Cyndy Chwelos, one of our wonderful VDD Steering Committee members, has been sharing some of the daily drawing instructions with kids in Moberly Art + Culture Centre's eco-day camp, "Something Green: Art, Nature & You!"

During their two week course this group of 6-12 year-olds have tried the daily drawing instructions twice. Some of their drawings are on display in our Daily Drawing Project gallery. Try and guess which instruction they followed in the drawings below.

We hope to see these kids and their families at the finale event at Sunset Community Centre this weekend from 10 am - 12 pm!

We met with our interns today to review all the events we have planned for the city-wide finale on Saturday.

We also discussed ways we could encourage people to participate. We've found that if we say, "Would you like to do a drawing project?" it's easy for people to say, "I don't draw." What seems to work better is, "Do you have a few seconds to make a mark?" or, "This activity is especially for people who don't draw!"

As usual we did a couple of drawing activities to remind ourselves of the pleasure of drawing together. All of these drawings are collaborative: funny faces, creatures and compositions with abstract shapes.

We spent the afternoon today drawing creatures in the sunshine at Oppenheimer Park... it really feels like the downtown east side's backyard.

It was fun to hang out with local residents and watch our clothesline of creature drawings expand and grow. This was our last individual workshop before the Vancouver Draw Down Finale on Saturday, July 23. 

We had a great time at Britannia Community Centre's Canada Day celebration at Victoria Park yesterday. Everyone had fun drawing faces on red and white paper, with red and white pens—very patriotic!

We did collaborative funny faces, where each person at the table drew one part of a face then passed it along to be completed by the rest of the group. We also did "one-minute, continuous-line contour drawings" of someone else's face, where you weren't allowed to look at your paper, or lift your pen off the page.

The latest report from Britannia is that approximately 400 drawings were done at the workshop--that's a lot of faces!

Since artist Jasna Guy and her relatives visiting from Singapore couldn't get to the Vancouver Art Gallery on Sunday for our Vancouver Draw Down workshop, they had some fun drawing collaborative creatures at home, using our online instructions. Jasna said, "Everyone loved the participatory aspect of the activities—and the quirky results engendered lots of laughs. We did over 70 drawings together (9 of us)."

Here are some of their delightful creatures... thanks for sharing, Jasna!

The VDD team had a great time on the 4th floor at the Vancouver Art Gallery yesterday, presenting a creature drawing workshop as part of the VAG's Making Place program.

We loved having whole families join us to create these wonderful collaborative drawings. Here are some photos from our afternoon at the VAG:

Our Vancouver Draw Down workshop at Kitsilano Community Centre yesterday brought together seniors and children from the Tiggy Winkle Preschool for some enjoyable drawing activities.

This was an opportunity for the seniors to spend time with the children doing some old-fashioned activities, like paper airplanes and paper dolls. We also drew lots of silly faces that you can see strung on banners across the lobby at Kits.

We had a wonderful time at the Museum of Anthropology yesterday, presenting our workshop, "(F)Light of Birds: Collaborative Pinprick Drawings."

Museum visitors were invited to draw birds inspired by ones they found in the museum's collections. The lines of each drawing were carefully pin-pricked to create the exquisite drawings of light you see in the images below, now on view in the Museum Café.

More images of this workshop are available for viewing on Flickr.