Page Twenty-two THE PAINT BOX

Places to Sketch

HERE are plenty of places around Vancouver, and many more within

easy reach, that are good sketching grounds — the city itself with its

fine skyline and its setting of mountains and sea, tree-shaded streets ending in a glimpse of blue mountains and a white sail on blue water, busy streets going down to ships, and the bustling, colourful life of the waterfront. There are great Pacific liners and battered, rusty tramps from the Orient and the South. There are wheat ships for the Panama, and big windjammers being loaded with lumber for Australia by turbaned Hindoos.

In Stanley Park there are huge old fir trees and miles of paths through the tangled forest. One can sit and sketch the great brown trunks of firs and cedars, set off by the delicate green of vine maple and salmon-berry, or the flowers and lawns of the cultivated park. The rock-gardens are beautiful at nearly all times of the year in our mild climate; and if one cares for animal studies, there are many interesting creatures, from badgers to bears, in the zoo.

English Bay provides splendid material for one’s sketch-book. Near by ate Coal Harbour and the Lost Lagoon. False Creek, too, has its hour. of beauty when the sunset turns the smoke of the sawmills to splendid colour, with the orange light of the sawdust-burners beginning to glow, when the water lies flat and blue, splashed with the brown and orange of great booms of logs pulled by little tugs. A subject for a ‘(pinberatere.

Then there is Fairview with its view of the city strung out against a back- ground of harbour and mountain; Kitsilano and Point Grey with their views of snow-capped mountains and the sea; Shaughnessy Heights, and its many fine houses and lawns; Marine Drive with its woods, its beautiful homes and its gardens.

On the delta lands of the Fraser, there are the Chinese gardens, where yellow men in huge conical hats work in the geometrically patterned fields. These flat fields stretch back to where a row of cottonwoods and Mount Baker — rising in the distance like a pearl in an opal sky — complete the picture. Steveston offers Japanese fishing-boats, dykes with little wooden bridges leading to little shabby houses, and tiny gardens full of purple iris and pink daisies: where family wash in brilliant colours is displayed across the front verandah, and the little brown Japanese children crowd around and _ stick their fingers in your paint.

The north shore of the inlet has great variety, — from the rocky head- lands and little sandy coves to the canyons of Capilano, Lynn and Seymour, From Grouse Mountain unfolds a glorious panorama of city and gulf and the higher peaks of Crown and the Lions.

There is a wonderful view of the Lions from Vancouver Heights, as also of the Inlet and the, North Arm. The North Arm is. rugged and impressive, as is Howe Sound with its mountains rising straight from the sea.

Victoria,.on Vancouver Island, is a beautiful place, like an old English town transplanted to this far edge of the world. Spring is the time for sketching there, when the glory of the broom is on Beacon Hill and the ground under the oak trees is covered with wild flowers. Within easy reach are many rocky bays