Here are five reasons to check out the Big Draw fest
1. Dancers
Big Draw is an annual (free) festival now in its seventh year. Celebrating the simple, primal act of drawing, Big Draw presents professional artists and other creative types hosting dozens of workshops for all levels of artistic ability. The workshops take place anywhere from community centres to art galleries to, in the case of Life Drawing with Dancers (with dancers in costume as models), the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
2. Comics
The artists of local publisher Cloudscape Comics welcome budding comics creators or just pencil-pushers who want to have fun to join them for the improv form of storytelling through art known as a comics jam (Memorial South Park Fieldhouse).
3. Nature
In Walking, Looking, Drawing: Micro Macro Perspectives, the Urban Animal Agency takes drawers on a field walk along the shoreline of Second Beach in Stanley Park. Artists will “explore intertidal beings with the tenacity to survive between the aquatic and the terrestrial, the ocean and the rocks,” and draw what they see through a microscope. These “micro-drawings” will then be used to create a giant collaborative scroll.
4. Knitting
Discover the intersection of drawing, dancing and knitting as participants get to express themselves by covering the inside of Sunset Community Centre with yarn. There will also be a performance of Tricoter, described as“a contemporary dance that integrates dance, drawing with yarn and knitting.”
5. Robots
Draw, colour and/or create a robot in the workshop Robots of Hastings (Hastings Community Centre), then create a wearable button to take home.