Pedestrians at a Traffic Light
This morning I grabbed a coffee at Blenz Coffee on Davie/Granville, and sat down to make quick drawings of pedestrians. Drawing people at the traffic light is an intense learning experience, and a corner cafe is my kind of art-school. Sometimes you get 5 seconds, sometimes 7, and on the rare lucky occasion you get someone standing still for 10 seconds.
The idea of drawing subjects in so little time is scary to most people, but there is liberation inside this constraint. There are so many things you cannot do, and not trying sets you free to do other things. This includes getting the contours right, emphasizing outer shapes, and the task of differentiating people based on their clothing and poses. Sometimes when we obsess over other details, these features get lost.
As you can see from the drawings below, there’s a lot of character and unique identity you can put down in just a few seconds of line-drawing.
After filling the first page, I considered leaving. But the sun had started to shine right in my face, and it felt good to be warm like that. Doing the full spread was a good idea, I knew it would look way better than a single side. So I hung around to do that.
An observation about pop music - the number of pop stars who don’t work 9-5 jobs singing about the weekend is too damn high!
Not bad for 60 minutes, right? Time well spent, I say!