Monday 5 August 2013

A tale of two waterfronts

 North Vancouver's waterfront is dominated by heavy industry, with huge facilities for shipping coal, wheat, wood chips, sulphur.  West Vancouver's - not so much.  In fact, I think industry is banned there altogether.  North Vancouver has enormous coal-moving machines dwarfing the trains that are always coming and going and crashing together, rows of ocean-going freighters, loud roaring noises, sirens blaring, twenty-storey tall sprinklers going off every few minutes (to stop the coal from spontaneously combusting, or maybe just to try to keep the dust down), big excavators bashing down trees to widen the access roads, and tanker trucks blasting their horns at cyclists who dare slow them down.  West Vancouver's waterfront has an arts festival, free music and people drinking wine under umbrellas.  Both are fun to draw (using the old environmentalist trick of picturing the industrial sites in undersaturated greys and the 'natural' areas in bright oversaturated colours).




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