May 21, 2018 – petescully

LDD May 2018s

It is time for another ‘Let’s Draw Davis!’ sketchcrawl, and where better than to sketch at the Davis World Cup. The youth soccer tournament will feature 104 teams from across northern California, each assigned a different country, and so will be a colourful sporting spectacle. Also a great opportunity to practice some quick people sketching!

The sketchcrawl will begin this Saturday (May 26) at 10:00am outside the Davis Arts Center (the corner of F St and Covell; we will meet by the entrance) where I will give a quick demo of fast people sketching. I won’t however get much sketching done after that, as I myself have to go and coach one of the teams playing (Serbia), one of the co-organizers Ann will be available. The group will meet up at 1:30pm at the Davis Library to look at each others’ sketchbooks, and of course you can keep on sketching after that! (Check out the ‘Keeper Wars’ in the evening, it’s really fun!).

As always, this sketchcrawl is free and open to anyone who likes to draw. All you need is something to draw with and something to draw on. Oh and maybe bring snacks and a drink. And cheer on the Davis teams! (We all wear white or blue).

Let’s Draw Davis is a monthly sketchcrawl in Davis California, organized by myself, Alison Kent and Ann Filmer. It was started in 2010 as a way to encourage local sketchers to get outside and draw our city, and meet other people who like to do the same. We hold sketchcrawls each month in different locations with a different focus each time, they are open to all ages and levels and a great opportunity to learn from each other. Check out the Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/LetsDrawDavis/

In early March we went to LA, and saw the Space Shuttle Endeavour. It was quite an experience. I loved the Space Shuttle as a kid. It was so exciting. That massive fuel tank that falls away, the spacewalks, the landing back on Earth, as far as I was concerned, it was something we would all be riding on in The Future. I loved reading about the space program. I remember clearly the Challenger disaster, when I was 10, that shocking image, that double headed explosion. I read every article about that I could find. I put the newspaper on my bedroom wall, along with the photos of all the astronauts. It was a scary moment for me, when the realities of space travel broke my fantasy of becoming an astronaut; except I never really wanted to become an astronaut, I just wanted to go to space, float around a bit, maybe meet some aliens. Now the Space Shuttles are all retired. I did see this one before, from a good distance. When Endeavour was retired, it was flown to LA on the back of a large airplane, and passed over Sacramento – and Davis – on the way to a Bay Area flyover, before heading down to its resting place in Los Angeles. Now it is at the California Science Center in LA’s Exposition Park. Up close, it looks different than I expected. It is not some shiny sci-fi spaceship, it is very functional feeling, made up of a series of tough looking squares, each one numbered, looking almost like it was cobbled together on the job. Endeavour was in fact built as a replacement to Challenger, and between 1992 and 2011 she flew 25 missions into the earth’s orbit. I enjoyed sketching Endeavour, rekindling all my boyhood space travel dreams.