Last Sunday, I joined in the Opus Outdoor Painting Challenge 2015. It was said there were 130 adults in the downtown registry, but it didn’t quite look like 130 paintings—but no surprise, I don’t think there is any event where all individuals show. Anyway, it was fairly mellow there, but oh so hard to find the tents. They were on top of a parking garage, with a girl standing by a sign at the front of the entrance to the upstairs parkade on the sidewalk….but it would have helped to have a sign further off to guide folks—especially once the registration was over, as there was no signs out anymore.

Anyways, I showed up around 12:16 or so, and headed off to Crab Park. I was feeling unsure about the park after reading the area I’d have to walk through, but turns out there was nothing to worry about at the moment, hardly anybody around to attack me at the moment.

I saw a few other artists in the park, and plenty of dogs running around unleashed. Since I am more into animals than buildings as my own subjects, I decided catching the dog’s day was fit for my expression of “catching the day”. Also, the dog is catching a frisbee…

Since I had about 2.5 hours, I worked at getting it finished instead of perfect, and all you can really do is hope the people chosen to judge the entries think your work goes with what they think fits the theme anyways.

Though I overall enjoyed the event (free snacks  included from PureBreads, yummy), my impressions based on the choices for the prizes would conclude that skill and small detail level was in fact more relevant than what I recall reading, as the folks who won were primarily working with painting the building structures downtown, with small details and less activity expression. Even the child’s category paid favors to buildings, regardless if another kid’s actually seemed more relevant to catching a live being in a moment.

There was also about 15-20 random draw prize winners for products or gift cards given out. I tried to ensure I was telling myself not to expect anything, but who wouldn’t want to win free good quality supplies?.

The thing that bothered me, since there were rules to be physically present during this name draw, was that 2 kids(both of them siblings) who were in fact sleeping in a car were considered valid winners of this random draw, simply because their other sibling or parent was present, in addition to another I believe. Can’t the kids share? What of the other people? either good luck, or it was set up to have duplicate entries, perhaps? Ah, what can I do?

I decided to visit the park again after dropping my things at home, but this time for photos (especially of dogs, I have no dog to take photos of), I later went back with my better camera. I realized I have biked past it before but never explored it.

   

The overhead road to the park.

 

Two of the dogs playing around.

That basically concludes the art part of my day. I had the unfortunate event of having a bird lay droppings on my sun hat as I walked back quickly, um….good thing for the hat. Somehow also got myself into a situation of being verbally bullied for being a Caucasian on my cell phone. They were very rowdy and the guy accuses me of being “unable” to handle them. Awkward.

Anyway, I left soon after that. Back to my other works.

The dog painting is up on my Etsy shop: