Drinking and Drawing

Turnout wasn't as high as I had hoped, but everyone had a really good time. It's funny, because the group of people who ended up doing the bulk of the drawing really took ownership of the final product. I hadn't seen that happen before, but I think it's because at prior events there were so many people drawing that they only got to go once or twice.
I had a really good time and saw a lot of people I wanted to see, and finally met some people I had only met on Twitter.

My use of Twitter on this event was really interesting to me. I created a Twitter account for DrinknDrawPDX, and specifically sought out people on Twitter that I thought would be interested. Over time, DrinknDraw developed a social network that only slightly overlaps my own, and introduced me to people I wouldn't have met otherwise. And I'm still not sure that all those people know that I'm DrinknDraw and DrinknDraw is me. Funny.
So DrinknDraw developed a small social network on Twitter, and I spammed the hell out of everyone from my own Twitter account, and Facebook, and the Oregon Media Network, each of which had a slightly different result from a different but overlapping group of people.
The DrinknDraw account ended up being followed by some local art and media outlets, and had people volunteer to post press releases, as well as volunteer for the event itself.
That was pretty cool, actually- normally the process of getting volunteers for chapter events involves sending an email to a massive distribution list and then having interested people contact a coordinator who tries to coordinate them- in this instance, I called for volunteers from both Twitter accounts and within minutes I had one confirmed volunteer for each account. I love the speed and ease of tweeting those kinds of requests, and how quickly the community passed on the info. It's really cool.

At the event, someone I had never met before showed up and took the lovely photos posted here. Her name is Heather Zinger, and I think there's a wonderful artistic sensibility in her photography. And lo, she's interested in animation, so will show up to our WIA meeting.

On a different note, I think I need to set aside Don Quixote for now- it's a huge time sink, and I have some library books I'm dying to get to. It's a strange book- I spent a long time expecting a Decameron/Canterbury Tales kind of thing, and then just when I had accepted that it was going to take on the novel form, it switched over and seems to have become that. Which makes it easier to set down, actually.