The thing about using the watercolour Moleskine sketchbooks again, I just love how the pages open flat making me think, I really need to draw a two-page panorama on this one, I just have to. But of what? I wander Davis sometimes not sure what I want to spend time drawing over two pages that I haven’t already drawn. Not everything works. The time of day makes a difference. How long I have to draw is fairly essential. How interested in the shape of the buildings I am. I mean the buildings aren’t going to be too unusually shaped, this isn’t the world of the Dark Crystal or something. With this one, on D Street at the corner of 3rd, I’d not drawn these two buildings before (at least from this angle, I’ve drawn the other side) and I had never realized what a pair they make. So I stood in between them and drew. I didn’t finish it all there though, I coloured in later. Style Lounge, and Myland Nails and Spa. Until very recently Style Lounge had these large ornate mirrors parked outside, which is where they would have their outdoors work with clients (I’m sorry my vocabulary for style stuff is limited, me having no style at all). I never did draw one but they looked really cool from the street. The other side of the building is painted all different colours, it adds a bit of life. Myland Nails and Spa, again not really aimed at me, unless they are actually a hardware store that sells nails and spanners, but part of the sign has fallen off. But they only sell nails and spanners, nothing else. Maybe I should go in there like Ronnie Corbett, asking for nails. No, I won’t do that. I bet that happens all the time though. No, I don’t bet that. This is what happens when I just write without really thinking, I can’t be bothered coming up with any actual jokes or interesting things to say. I can’t even come up with a good blog title. My last post was actually fairly well written I thought, little bit of history, bit of emotion, bit of metaphor linking the theme of the drawing to the wider world and my longing to get back to see London, while this one is more “I’m sure I have a lot to say, but this ain’t the time”. Sometimes my blog posts veer off dramatically from the theme of the drawing, like I’ll post a drawing of a bookshop and use that to launch into a story about when I got chased by a dog in Namur. (There was not such post by the way, and anyway it was two dogs). Sometimes like this one they are literally about nothing. I’m always a little worried when I write a post like this that someone who knows me will read it and think, oh that guy hasn’t got a clue, what’s this? What is all this? Like, they may have Googled me because I coached their kids soccer and found all my drawings of Davis, which are nice, and then read some of the stories, which are funny, and then read a blog post like this where it’s not really saying anything. “‘Nails and Spanners’? Is this guy nuts?” Or perhaps they were forwarded a link to my sketchblog after my drawings were shared across the university or in a newspaper somewhere and they read the words bit and go, ok nice drawing but do we need the words, what are these words and do they even go together? Years ago, when I had my old ’20six’ blog, I would often write blog posts with just words and no drawings – what a concept! – and act like I knew how to write things and have ideas. And then when I would post drawings, I would include some text but in a much smaller font, in italic, and it would typically be nonsensical gibberish that I felt it necessary to include but didn’t want to distract from the drawing. These days I just ramble. I don’t re-read them. And now WordPress can also convert your blog posts into audio podcasts through Anchor. It is possible to have the posts converted into a generated voice. Now for me this doesn’t make a lot of sense as I am posting drawings, but I suppose if someone was listening to me talk about the drawing in more details and the experience and all of that, it might be interesting. But probably not. So I decided to test out the service and converted one of my long posts about Dublin, if you remember I did that virtual Dublin sketchbook last year. The generated voice is Male American, and my words said in Male American auto-voice sound absolutely hilarious, to me alone. Now, this has been posted just as a test, ok, and I will very likely delete it if I actually want to publish any of these stories on that platform in the future, in my own proper voice. But hearing my words in auto-generated non-ironic Male American is quite a thing: https://anchor.fm/petescully/episodes/Dublin-Part-2-literally-littered-with-literature-eqslqo. Especially the bit where the Male American voice keeps pronouncing BERNard as BerNARD specifically in a bit about pronouncing BERNard in that way. Twelve minutes of fun.