Month: May 2016

what’s it all a boot

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adidas soccer shoes
My son’s football boots. Or soccer shoes, if you will; “cleats”, they like to call them here. He has been wearing these since the Fall 2015 season. Prior to this he wore lime green Diadoras. The trend these days as you of course know all too well is for highly colourful football boots, often with crazy psychedelic patterns on them, and sometimes with a different colour shoe on each foot. It was nice therefore that he decided to go for a fairly straightforward black pair, with blue laces. These get a good run out too. Also, he has scored in every single game he has worn them, so far (that’s twelve games in a row now). I am coaching AYSO again, for the fourth time; this season we are the Green Dragons.

Speaking of football, what about Leicester City eh! Yes, I was in the minority hoping they wouldn’t do it, only because my team, Spurs, were the only challengers towards the end, but even then we will end up pretty far behind them, probably in 2nd, but hopefully not in 3rd. I am well happy for them, and despite Spurs having an absolutely vintage season in many ways, we could never catch Leicester, and they won it in style. 5000-1 odds! In April last year they were still bottom, but managed to stay up. Of course, I predicted they’d win it this year ages ago. Actually, no I didn’t, I said, in my blog post about the new kits last August, “How will Leicester do this year? Well, they’ll either stay up (happy Lineker face) or they will go down (sad Lineker face).” Which is close. Villa as predicted were awful, and I got it right that Sunderland would stay up, but I also said Newcastle would as well, and they didn’t.

Coming up are the “Euros”, and if I get my act together I will produce another guide to all the kits, along with predictions. If you don’t really like hearing about football kits, by the way, and follow me on Twitter, especially if you aren’t too into someone getting really passionately annoyed about a group of men wearing red socks with white shorts and white tops (England I am looking at you) I might suggest unfollowing for the whole month of June, and then following again in mid July when I start talking about sketching again. I have some things to say about football kits. And don’t get me started on the fancy fluorescent footwear…

Florian Afflerbach

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Last week the urban sketching community was stunned by the news that one of our own, Florian Afflerbach, aka ‘Flaf’, had passed away in a traffic accident. He was just 35. I am still in shock about the news. Urban Sketchers has posted a tribute to Florian at http://www.urbansketchers.org/2016/05/flaf-in-memoriam.html. As one of the original contributors to the Urban Sketchers website he was a popular and inspiring artist, an architect by training, perhaps most famous for his incredible perspective drawings, and of course his love of classic cars – he was often called the ‘Car Guy’. He taught all over Europe – only days before he had been giving a workshop in Malaga alongside Luis Ruiz, another of my sketching heroes – and he made a lot of friends along the way.

florian afflerbach sm.jpgflorian and rolf at kaffeehaus.jpg

I remember Florian from just before Urban Sketchers, back in the early days on Flickr, he always gave me encouraging comments and I was so inspired by his grasp of drawing perspective. We finally got to meet in Lisbon in 2008, and had some nice conversations about sketching and football. I took a perspective workshop led by Florian and Gerard Michel, and saw that he was such a patient teacher. The next time we met was in Barcelona, and we laughed because we were both wearing white shirt, black hat, glasses, red hair; I’m copying you again, I said. I had started to get into sketching old cars too, and I was looking forward to taking the workshop offered by Florian and Lapin this summer at the Urban Sketching Symposium in Manchester. It was ages since I last spoke to him, and now the chance will not come again. So I’ll say it here: thank you for everything Florian, I learned a lot from you my friend. You will be greatly missed by urban sketchers across the world, and by me.

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At the 2nd Urban Sketching Symposium in Lisbon, 2011: Liz Steel, Florian and Pete (photo by Matthew Brehm)

My deep condolences are with his family and friends at this time.

You can see Florian’s work on his Flickr site, and on Urban Sketchers, and at his website, Flaf.de. I hope he inspires you as much as he has inspired me.