This is a Leap Year. For those of you on other planets, a Leap Year is one where everybody makes rubbish jokes about those who have birthdays on February 29th technically being far younger than they really are. It happens once every four years and apparently we have them to correct our imprecise calendars; if we didn’t then we’d have a situation eventually where the sun would be getting up at lunchtime and something to do with aliens. So we call this extra day ‘Leap Day’ and act as if it is somehow ‘extra’. To make it really ‘extra’, another day in the weekend would have been nice. Saturday 27th, Sunday 28th, Leap Day 29th, Monday 1st, etc. Apparently though we can’t do that because, again, aliens. Anyway I sketched more spring blossom on Leap Day lunchtime, revisiting a scene that I sketched in November when those same trees were flaming with red and orange. That autumnal scene is below. I didn’t sketch them while leafless, you will have to just imagine them naked. Now they are clothed in brilliant white blossom, tinged with pale green. The Chemistry Building looms behind, unchanged and like a rock. I mean literally like a Rock, because the adjoining Rock Hall lecture building is away to the left, off-screen. The trees’ positions look slightly different, due to my slightly different standing location (you go where the shade is on a sunny day). It’s a test of observation. Two seasons in Davis.
Month: March 2016
i love parrots in the springtime
This is Cruess Hall, UC Davis. It’s the home of the UC Davis Design Department. I’ve given a couple of guest talks in classes here before to design students about keeping sketchbooks. I wanted to sketch it while the blossom was so pink; even now, a week or so later, it has already desaturated. By that I mean it is still pink, but less so, it has lost some of its saturation. That reminds me of a joke, “What do you call a grey parrot? Polyunsaturated.” Actually that isn’t an old joke, I literally just made that one up a few moments ago. It does remind me of another joke, which goes “What is a polygon? A dead parrot.” Now that one is old, I read it in a joke book when I was 7 or 8 years old. I remember it now, I remember it was one of those “5001 jokes for kids” books. That book has had more influence over my life than any book ever, and yet that joke is the only one I remember now. I remember laughing so much when I read it, I was in hysterics. I couldn’t even tell the joke, it made me laugh so much. I stopped trying in the end, because I’m sure nobody else would have the same reaction as me, so the joke became my own, if I ever needed cheering up I was just ask myself, “what’s a polygon?” and laugh away for hours. Now I know that there is another very famous comedic episode about a ceased-to-be parrot, but I maintain to this day that the Python sketch is only the second funniest parrot-based piece of humour in existence (maybe the third now, if ‘Polyunsaturated’ ever takes off). Now I don’t want to give the impression that we Brits have some obsession with parrots expired or otherwise, we don’t go to school and take the pledge of allegiance to the dead-parrot-sketch (though we probably should). That said, a couple of years ago I dressed as a pirate for Halloween and went trick-or-treating with a parrot on my shoulder (well my son was trick-or-treating, not me, I just had to go with him). One person made a dead-parrot-sketch reference to me, and I pretended not to get it. So they explained it to me, they actually explained the dead-parrot-sketch to me, like, in full detail. As they said in Casablanca, “we’ll always have parrots.” (And that joke was taken from Red Dwarf).
So, this is Cruess Hall. It is also the home of the UC Davis Design Museum. Hey guess what, I will be having an exhibition of my sketchbooks there this Fall, tentatively scheduled from September to November. More details as they become settled, and I’m scheduled for a talk as well, but it will be fun. And hopefully 100% parrot free (except if anyone mentions polygons).
line up in line
And now for something completely different. These are very quick sketches of people standing in line at Starbucks. Before you all go “hang on you hate Starbucks and don’t even drink coffee” let me explain. I don’t hate Starbucks, I just don’t drink coffee. Starbucks does occasionally have nice pastries but I don’t like their tea or other drinks so I never go there. However there is one inside the Silo building at UC Davis, and I sit near there when I am eating my lunch or reading comics on my iPad. I never actually get anything from there, not even the aforementioned nice pastries, because the queue (or ‘line’ as they prefer to say here) is always so long and slow. “Slowbucks” they should call it. However this slow line is good for something – practicing people drawing. Now I could have drawn individual people with all their details and faces and stuff, but I was practicing one particular thing. I was doing that thing where you draw a whole load of people or things without taking the pen off of the paper. you place the pen down, and just let it go. This type of ‘single-line’ sketch can produce some very interesting results. Because you can’t pick the pen up and stop for a second, you have to back up or cross spaces until you are less concerned with smooth details and more with the overall shape itself – it is a very liberating experience.
People look at their devices while waiting in line for their cup of Joe. by the way as a non-coffee-drinker is it only a cup of Joe if it’s in the morning, as in ‘Morning Joe’? Or is it called something else after 12, like ‘Afternoon Dave’ or ‘Suppertime Barbara’? Who was Joe anyway, was he a famous coffee-drinker? Is it rhyming slang, like ‘Joseph’s Toffee’ or something? I suppose I could have asked the people in line but I didn’t want to break the fourth wall. This was another single-line sketch (or ‘single-queue’ sketch perhaps).
I wasn’t done sketching quick people. Sticking with the single-line theme I went outside and sketched passers-by, each in that same fast and loose fashion. As this was outside the UC Davis Silo, near the Silo Bus Terminal, people moved about fairly rapidly, giving me just a few seconds to capture them. Not easy. It was a cooler day, overcast, I was still in my 30s and I tried to get different walking poses wherever I could. This being a university, there are many people with backpacks. Why not give it a go, this quick people sketching?
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petescully 