Food has often found its way into Catrina Megumi Longmuir’s paintings and drawings, pulled from one of her most comforting memories. As a child, some of her happiest times were spent in the back kitchen of her grandfather’s gallery in Tokyo.

“I can remember how many times we’d have lunch in this backroom,” the artist and documentary filmmaker, who’s running a workshop at the daylong Vancouver Draw Down festival, tells the Straight over the phone. “I’d get a 500-yen coin from my grandad and go get food for everyone. There were five or six of us shoved into this teeny tiny backroom, eating.”

Longmuir will try to get participants to tap into their own comfort-food memories at Draw Down, which offers more than 30 free events around town.

This year’s activities, aimed at all ages and levels of artistic ability, encompass themes as diverse as Chinese mythology, sea monsters, Northwest Coast symbols, and grand opera—all interpreted through simple pastels, pencils, and pens. (See the Vancouver Draw Down website for the full schedule, and for the Online Daily Drawing Challenge that takes place in the lead-up to the event.)

“It’s all about not getting really sentimental, but playing with the nostalgia around food,” says Longmuir of her workshop, adding she might spur people into drawing by asking them to write or depict a favourite family recipe. “For me, it’s a theme I keep going back to, because there’s something universal about it. I really appreciate the history and culture and memories, plus the important relationships that are built around food.”

Her Visual Feast: Food Inspired Picture-Stories theme resonated with the Old Barn Community Centre near UBC on Thunderbird Boulevard, a facility trying to build a sense of neighbourhood amid freshly built condo developments. The hope is to eventually integrate the resulting drawings and recipes into a community cookbook.

“I think we’ll keep to simple watercolours, crayons, and pencils—things associated with being a child and going back to the basics, so that people can just be able to play and not say, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ ”

That’s also the idea behind the six-year-old event, which encourages old and young to let loose their inner artist. Over at Queen Elizabeth Park, next to the Bloedel Conservatory, Vancouver Opera will be hosting its own Draw Down workshop.

“The first thing people think of when they think of opera is music and singing, but there’s so much more,” explains VO’s director of education and community engagement, Colleen Maybin, who’s heading up the program. “We’re really trying to show that there are a lot of visual artists that work with us, and there’s a lot of drawing, painting, and gluing going on.”

VO is bringing out the glitter glue and multiple pieces of fabric for kids seven and under to affix to silhouettes of either a boy, girl, cat, or dog—“designing” a costume for the characters.

Adults will receive a small square taken out of a large Pirates of Penzance poster, which they’ll reinterpret through pastels, pens, pencils, and crayons on their own square. By the end of the day, Maybin hopes to have assembled all of those pieces into a large version of the poster—this time “bitmapped” from the participants’ individually tweaked fragments.

“The further you stand away, the more interesting it looks,” she says, adding that her idea is based on an exercise often given to people getting into scene painting for theatre and opera. “It very much becomes about the artistry and people partnering.”

Whether participants wind up building a wall-size sea monster or illustrating a cookbook, much the same could be said of everything happening at Vancouver Draw Down.

Vancouver Draw Down happens at various locations on Saturday (June 20).