Tiny People of Rain-couver
The change of seasons is a good time to look at tiny people again.
Does this happen to you? I often feel compelled to draw at new locations and, if the weather does not permit me to find one, I end up not drawing at all.
A part of this feeling comes from thinking that my job - as a SneakyArtist - is to find new places of SneakyArt. Another part is the social media pressure - trying to avoid looking stale online. So, the rain can act as a constraint upon this freedom to ‘go anywhere’.
But constraints, as I have said before, are actually freedoms in disguise.
What is the freedom from this particular weather constraint? It is that I am able to dive deeper into the same place, in this case the neighborhood cafe, and find something fresh.
But I wasn’t done adding constraints. Not only was I drawing from the same cafe as I had done before, I would be drawing from exactly the same seat, looking out in the same direction, as before. And not only was I drawing in the same cafe from the same seat looking in the same direction, I would be drawing in the same style as before - TinyPeople!
So what can I get from this exercise?
Everything is the same, but in a sense nothing is the same. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said,
“No man steps in the same river twice. For it is no longer the same river, and he is not the same man.”
When the seasons have changed, the people have changed too. Their behaviours have changed. Their clothing has changed. What I am drawing is completely different from what I drew in early Spring, and then later in Summer.
It is an important consideration that we don’t often give enough thought. Is weather a factor in your work? Do you consider your work to be a record of space and time? Do you note how something changes with time?
With only ink lines, with single line portraits, I made it my job to do that. Here are the people I saw.
I shared the drawing on Reddit, and it went viral on r/mildlyinteresting, r/drawing and r/vancouver. Apparently umbrellas are a sign of weakness in the Pacific North West, and Seattlers were confounded at this apparent Vancouver way to do things.
Since my subjects were at a traffic light, I had only about 10-15 seconds to draw each. While I started rusty (top left, going line by line), I think I got into the groove by the 7th or 8th portrait. After that, the drawings also became mostly single line, which can be very quick and evocative. After the first 10 or 15 portraits, I got comfortable drawing umbrellas at different angles too!
