On October 6th I gave a talk at the UC Davis Design Museum as part of the reception to my sketchbook exhibition, “Conversations with the City”, which is curated by Tim McNeil and James Housefield. A lot of people came! Thank you to all who attended, it was lovely to meet you all and talk about sketching. I talked about my own story with sketching, and how I go about it, what I look for, what I used, and the various sketchcrawls that I have organized. I talked about Urban Sketchers, about the symposia. I also talked about using the sketchbook as a way to document history, showing examples such as the Occupy UC Davis protests of late 2011, the history of my son’s shoes, the progression in my own technique by drawing the Varsity Theatre for ten years and also (the set-piece I’d been dying to show everyone) the progression from the Boiler Building to the Pitzer Center (you can see that progression in this post). It was a lot of fun.

Here I am talking about some of my pens, the Uni-ball Signo UM-151 pens I love so much. I like to point with my left hand. Goes back to my old big-bus tour-guide days, holding the microphone in the right hand and pointing with the left. And ducking to avoid branches.

Here, I am pointing out sketches from the pages of my earlier sketchbooks.

And finally, Q&A. Now get sketching! You can see some much better photos of the exhibition on the Arts Dept website at UC Davis: http://arts.ucdavis.edu/photo-gallery/photos-conversation-city

There is also a nice article about the show (and the sketchcrawl which was held yesterday…) in the Davis Enterprise, which has a much nicer photo of me at the museum event: http://www.davisenterprise.com/arts/scully-leads-sketchers-on-a-lets-draw-davis-crawl/

If you want to to check out the exhibit, it is open Mon-Fri from 12-4pm, and on sundays from 2-4pm. It runs until November 13.