a thousand little pieces

April 9, 2010April 9, 201013 Comments

And so… today is petescully.com’s second birthday! If it feels like it’s been longer, well it has. My old 20six blog went for precisely three years before this one, so this is in fact my fifth blogiversary. And if that weren’t enough…

This is my 1000th post. That is, post #400 in two years, following exactly 600 posts in the previous three years (just so you know, I also hit 800 posts on the same date, April 9th, last year – 200 posts a year, I am consistent at least!). Wow, one thousand posts. I had better stop counting. I have had it in mind to move over many (if not all) posts from my old blog to this, but that would be a long, slow process. A lot of the old blog is non-sketchbloggery, the tale of my last months in England, and my first years in the land of the Amer’cans.

A thousand posts. I should have a competition or something! Nah.

I though about making a list of some of my personal favourite posts from the thousand, but that seemed like a lot of work. One I did like though, from the old site, was: “My Newborn Son, Luke”: the first sketch of my son, January 2008. And you might want to see my first blog post from April 9, 2005, “Jellied Els”, wherein I was making silly jokes about the golf (I intend to continue this tradition this weekend during the Master’s). Oh, and here’s a drawing I still really like:

See: “Graffiti About Slash Street Affairs” October 2008

So where now? I will probably upload images to Zazzle to buy as postcards or something, since I hear that is a fun thing to do, and also finally get around to selling some originals on Etsy. I want to do this to help fund my trip to Portland for the Urban Sketching Symposium. Of course, this requires me to be organized.

The one thing I will say though, sketching regularly and posting online has allowed me to greatly improve everything about how I draw, and I can se a clear path between where I was and where I am through the work I have online. That is exciting; I wonder where I’ll end up? For all I know, in five years time I may have tired of sketching and moleskines and micron pens altogether and be making little models out of lego and play-doh (um, I’m already doing that). But seeing other people’s work online continues to inspire me and helps me mould my own voice.

So my message remains the same, to all of you, pick up a pen, get some paper, and start drawing stuff around you, doesn’t matter what, doesn’t matter if it’s any ‘good’, it’s a record of who you are and where you are, and in years to come you will look at it and maybe even remember the thoughts that were going through your head as you drew. That is saving the world.

see you in portland

April 8, 2010April 7, 20103 Comments

Exciting times in the world of those people who go outside with a pen and sit down and draw things. The first Urban Sketching Symposium will be held at the end of July in Portland, Oregon, a global event drawing urban sketchers from, er, across the globe. Hosted by the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) and Urban Sketchers (USk), it will be quite the event.

Click on the poster to go to the event’s web site. This will hopefully be the first of many such global get-togethers, and a great opportunity to learn from and be inspired by some great illustrators. The third day of the symposium will coincide with the 28th Worldwide Sketchcrawl on July 31.

I’ve never been to Portland, Oregon, though my wife has family there. I’ve been told I’d really like it. I’ve never been to Portland in Dorset either, and I’ve always wanted to, mostly because of that old kids TV show “Portland Bill“, but also because the people of Portland, Dorset, have a famous fear of the word ‘rabbit‘, apparently. I like that.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I am going. I’m quite excited! I’ll see you there.

a learning curve

April 7, 2010May 27, 20101 Comment

I had a pen in my bag I’d bought in London, a uni-pin fineliner I got in the big Paperchase on Tottenham Court Road, and wanted to run it down. I have wanted to draw the Shields Library on campus for a while but never found myself a good angle. I have also wanted to mess about with curvilinear perspectives for quite some time but have not done so. Until now; I sat at lunchtime in the shade among the bicycles opposite the library and started drawing. I’ve made it look like a baseball stadium or something. It is a very big library, and very well stocked. It was my destination of choice when I first moved here, way before I started working on campus, when I was just coming off from my Master’s back in the UK, where I had gotten quite used to spending hours locked away in the polished silence of the Maughan Library on Chancery Lane, or the high-up dustiness of Senate House. As a medievalist and germanic philologist I enjoyed the privelige of being in those quiet parts of the library that nobody went to, because usually nobody else was studying what I was studying (similarly I had little problem with borrowing books). I’ve not dusted off those books in some time.

I showed this to my two-year-old, and he was immediately impressed that I’d drawn a picture of a bicycle. He’s one for the small details (bit like me).

best in snow

April 3, 2010April 3, 20106 Comments

A few weeks ago we drove up to the snow, which is found in the Sierra Nevadas about an hour and a half east of Davis. when I say th snow, I’m not talking about a sprinkling of white, I’m talking about SNOW. It must have been nine feet deep! Much of it was only a day old, fresh and powdery. We stopped at a rest stop just outside Truckee. It was my two-year-old son’s first experience of snow, so that was a lot of fun. Trying to build a snowman wasn’t easy, so I built a snow sith lord instead.