the changing of the guard

November 29, 2014November 27, 20142 Comments

Well it is the Thanksgiving Holiday, and by this time of year in Davis the autumnal colours have really exploded into bloom. It happens that bit later than in most parts of America, it seems, and the transition between November and December is when it hits its peak. This is Mrak Hall, above, where the main administration for UC Davis sits. I sat on a bench one lunchtime this week (a more pleasant experience now that the campus is smoke-free) to sketch this view, and I remembered that I’ve sketched it in Falls gone by on a couple of other occasion. Below, December 2010, a couple of weeks or so later in the season. You can see how the red-tinged tree has turned more orange, while the yellow tree has started to thin out on top.

Let’s go further back in time to 2007. The same date, December 10th, and a similar rate of autumnalisation (not a word people use, but I just did) though with more leaflessness on the top of the trees (I neglected to draw the leaves on the ground, obviously too difficult for me back in 2007).

That top sketch of Mrak was the final sketch in watercolour Moleskine #13, which was the ‘Art-Plus’ version (and slightly inferior to all the other versions, paper-wise). This bottom sketch was from watercolour Moleskine #2, and the middle one from #6. Time for a new sketchbook!

hurrah for thanksgiving day!

November 27, 2014November 27, 20146 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving to you all! Unless you’re not in America in which case, enjoy your Very Normal Thursday. In anticipation of our lovely eat-turkey-and-pumpkin-pie holiday I decided to get to work making something festive for our wall, and here it is. All cut from paper, with the main letters made of little paper mosaics. Here are the leaves, which will also go all over the table. Can I recommend making loads of paper leaves as a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon? It really is.

Here is an in-progress shot of the mosaic-making project, including a very British cup of tea.

And some thanksgiving coloured flowers. The big paper bag turkey was made by my son at school, and I love it.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

and for once in your life you have nothing to say

November 27, 2014Leave a comment

Click on the drawing to see it bigger. Another panorama, this one being from the Silo area of UC Davis, which as you may recall I have sketched once or twice or a million times before. (Aaaargh, I’ve been in Davis for ages!) Still, I’ve not drawn a two-page panorama from this angle. I had intended to colour the whole thing in (hello laziness, my old friend) but those trees are just a dull green with some crunchy brown so you’re not missing any Fall colours. You can see some of them in the rainy drawing below of the view of the Farmer’s Market at the Silo (every Wednesday lunchtime) which I sketched last month from the staircase you can see on the building in the right, above. Happy Thanksgiving folks!

you can’t give me the dreams that are mine anyway

November 25, 2014November 25, 20143 Comments

This is the side of the soon-to-be-remodeled Freeborn Hall at UC Davis, with the Memorial Union building in the background. I sketched this one foggy autumnal lunchtime last week. I only wanted to add in a dash of colour, for the Fall season is in full flow here. Actually I wanted to colour in the whole thing but couldn’t be bothered, so before you applaud my effective limited use of colour, remember you are congratulating my laziness. Only kidding (kind of). With this drawing, I was really attracted to the shapes more than anything so I think it does work with just the lines and a splash of autumn. I am amazed I had never noticed this scene before, despite walking through it a million times. I had gotten off the bus one morning, listening to some music or other (I think it was Pimlico by David Devant) when it just framed itself in front of me, ready-made. Whoah, those angles, that composition, that unmistakable UC Davis look. If I hadn’t been in a hurry to get to the office I would have stopped and sketched it right then and there. The image rattled around in my head for a couple of days like an unbelievably good idea that I had to realize before someone else discovered it, or the building got demolished, until I finally found a lunchtime to cycle over and capture it. It took about a half hour to forty minutes to sketch it. I love how it turned out as well, a good example of how I like a line-only sketch to be.

chip shop

November 18, 2014November 18, 20143 Comments

The Fall colours are here in Davis in their brief glory, brief because they take so long to arrive (stupid too-long summers) and then a little bit of Central Valley wind comes along and blows them all over the place…I really need to get out and paint some of these leaves while they are still up above me. Hey speaking of paints, this is the Paint Chip, a friendly art and framing store in downtown Davis, on the corner of the 3rd street block of F St (opposite the old City Hall). I had to sketch one lunchtime and I’ve never drawn this spot before. The sketchmapping of Davis continues. I’ve nearly sketched everywhere, nearly. I considered extending this panorama across F street to include the City Hall Tavern, because then I could have used the extremely hilarious pun-tastic title “Chip and Ale”. Unusually for me however, I decided not to keep on drawing a complicated panorama just so I could use a cheap joke. I have a history of going out of my way just so I can somehow have a not-even-that-funny line to use if the need ever arose. When I was 19 I actually went all the way to the Danish city of Århus, took a long train journey and everything, just so that if anyone ever asked me where Århus was, I could say “in the middle of Årstreet”. Hey I was 19 and it’s still funny all these years later, folks, I’m still getting mileage out of that one, sure I live in America and people don’t know Madness or Denmark or understand anything I say but it’s still funny, that long train journey with only twenty-five quid in my pocket was worth it in the long run. Anyway where was I? Oh yes, the Paint Chip, nice shop, you should go there some time.

early morning, norwich walk

November 12, 20146 Comments

Here is the last drawing done during my London trip this past summer; click on the image to see it in larger format. Well the last one I’m posting; chronologically this was the first one I did, but I only just recently remembered to go back and finish it (add colour, finish all the bricks). This is Norwich Walk, the street where I grew up and where my mum still lives, as drawn from my old bedroom window on my first early morning back in the UK. I was jetlagged of course so awake at ridiculous o’clock, with the window open wide and the bright dewy air softening the world. Of course our house isn’t one of the ones in this row because I was inside it when I was drawing, perhaps on the next trip I’ll draw the panorama from the other side of the road (but maybe not at 5:00am in the morning). This was my view every day for a few decades. I’ve drawn it before, in fact I recall drawing several felt-tip pen versions for my art homework back at high school. It hasn’t changed that much, but I remember when those driveways were all gardens; I think it was the Daniels family’s house to the right who made the first one, followed by ours, then everyone else followed suit. There are still a couple of front gardens left but not many, however there are no cars parked on the street any more. In my youth they were all parked on the other side of the already very narrow road. I spent a lot of time in that house in the middle as a kid, first when the Glennon family lived there, then when the Edwards family lived there. I remember when it got pebble-dashed, that was popular in the 1980s wasn’t it. One of my memories was just outside there when I got run over by a white van one Saturday afternoon. I was seven years old, playing with my friends Natasha and Simon, my Star Wars figures all over the front doorstep. This street was our playground, as were all narrow Watling Estate streets to the kids who lived in them. We ran over the road to knock for our friends Robert and Victoria. He couldn’t come out though so we went back across the street. I was going first, didn’t look where I was going, and then BAM, all I saw was white. Then I woke up on a couch with everyone screaming and crying around me, so I passed out again and woke up in hospital. They kept me in overnight; I was alright, had a big scar on my head for a while but I got some new Star Wars toys when I got back home which was wicked. I remember getting the AT-ST ‘scout walker’ and my big sister helping me create a landscape on the carpet with a blanket for all the Star Wars toys. I also got a card form everyone in my class, everyone except my friend Wayne who I sat next to, because as weird coincidence would have it, on that very same day he also got run over, but he injured his legs and was out of school for a lot longer. I was a lot more careful crossing the street after that, but these days it is much easier for kids to see oncoming traffic now that everyone parks on their driveways!

I sketched this in the panoramic ‘Alpha’ Stillman and Birn sketchbook (a great sketchbook that), before having a proper English breakfast with my Mum, and getting on the early tube to go and sketch Piccadilly Circus. I love that ‘first morning back home in Burnt Oak’ feeling. I wish I could get back there more often!

first street real estate

November 9, 20142 Comments

This is First Street Real Estate, on the corner of 1st & D in Davis, sketched yesterday afternoon. We had just been to see Big Hero Six – amazing movie by the way! – and I had a couple of hours daylight to draw. I haven’t been out sketching enough lately due to an unusually busy work period (though I did just draw a big complicated space-themed advent calendar; I have been doing art). The sun goes down so early now that my windows of sketch-opportunity become smaller. Oh it’s nothing new, happens every year, and soon those pesky leaves will be off those trees and I’ll be able to see the buildings better. My best Davis stuff always comes in the winter-time, I feel.

Anyway I wanted to sketch this place because I have spent a lot of time there this week hanging many of my other sketches, originals and prints from Davis, San Francisco and London, for this month’s upcoming exhibit. They will be on their walls through the end of December (and available to buy), and this coming Friday, November 14, there will be a reception as part of Downtown Davis’s 2nd Friday Art About. I will be there between 5:30 and 7:30 along with some sketchbooks, so if you want to come and say hello I’d be happy to meet you!

boards don’t hit back

November 2, 20143 Comments

(Click on the image to see a close-up). This time of year sees a noticeable increase in the number of these wooden sandwich boards that you find all over the UC Davis campus. Most of them advertise fraternities, sororities, clubs, groups, chapters, paragraphs, commas, and other things I do not understand. There’s a sign that simply says ‘Join Alpha Sig’, so I thought, ok board, you told me to so I will. It is probably some kind of Canadian mutant super hero team. And then I thought, actually I had better not, Alpha Sig might be the name of some alien robot (it certainly sounds like it) whose mission is to enslave the earth, and I can’t be getting involved in that sort of nonsense. And then I thought, why would Alpha Sig, with his (I am just assuming he’s a he, thought it’s probably not a question I would ask an alien robot, “oh by the way oh evil one, oh actually nothing it’s none of my business, get back to destroying that city”) advanced alien technology, why use such an antiquarian painted-wooden form of communication, in this age of social media and facebooks and hashtags. By the way, young people of Davis, please don’t say the word “hashtag” in front of other actual words at the end of your sentences, seriously, just don’t. Not out loud. Speaking of which, all the while I sketched this I was forced to listen to a group of young people talking in that way they talk, those ‘conversations’ they insist on having, where one person says something and then another person and so on. I had no headphones to listen to football podcasts because they were broken (where was Alpha Sig and his/her advanced alien technology when I needed it? Painting wooden boards probably). There they were talking about young people things like going to class, partying, and how absolutely awful their one other room-mate who-isn’t-there-right-now is. Almost an hour of whiny nonsense. I know people have this idea that overheard conversations are great catalysts for all sorts of creativity but they’re wrong, because they aren’t, they’re just boring and you should avoid them always. And so there’s all these boards, colourful and inviting, wanting you to JOIN IN and be PART of them, and evidently they work because those frat houses dotted around the outskirts of campus don’t just trash themselves you know.

These boards are up on the north side of the Quad, next to the Memorial Union (and the CoHo, where I get my lovely Thai curry pho). I couldn’t be bothered to draw the rest of it.