I have been getting the ‘on this day ten years ago I drew this’ bug, because it’s a decade since my worryingly over-productive January 2024 set of drawings around Davis (I mean, January was always my busiest month at work, yet I had the energy to produce a lot of two-page drawings that month). It’s always a good moment to reflect on the changes. This week my then-six-year-old son became a sixteen-year-old son, which scares me to think how fast that’s happened. I’m working in the same department, just in a very different job, but I’m still plugging away with drawing campus on my lunchtimes. I’ve published two books since then, had a successful retrospective sketchbook show, been interviewed by the chancellor of the university, done a lot of travelling, and there’s been a pandemic in the middle. The world has been an ‘Interesting Times’ sort of place in the past decade, give me the decade before that any day. But looking at just one spot and tracking the changes, this view of Walker Hall above, the new modern Graduate Center in the historic refurbished building, is a good example. Regular followers will have seen my sketches of this building as it was slowly turned into the center that we see today, and many of my in-progress sketches are still on display in the lobby there, which is a massive honour (as a former grad coordinator I always maintained good relations with Grad Studies, and it was the previous Dean Jeff Gibeling who gave me the idea to draw the progress of the construction when it was first announced a decade or so ago in a meeting). I think I may have already known the future plans when I drew the panorama below, or maybe that was a little afterwards, but this view was always one I wanted to draw like this, and of all the panoramas I drew in January 2014 this one was my favourite. Now it has captures a moment in time that has passed. I liked the big diagonal shadow against the windows, and trying to convey the large E-shaped building using curvilinear perspective. It was drawn in the old Seawhite of Brighton book I was using then, while the newer one above was drawn in the watercolour Moleskine (side note, in recently comparing older scans to newer ones, I’ve decided I don’t like my current Epson scanner at all, I cannot seem to capture the right amount of clarity no matter how much I mess with the settings, unlike with my older (now long-departed) HP scanner. I’ve rescanned some older drawings recently and they don’t even compare with the older scans, regardless of 300dpi or 72 dpi. It’s subtle when they are small but I really notice it now. Time for a new scanner.) Anyway, this one above might put a final bookend to my Walker Hall series of sketches. It’s been a fun journey, but the building’s finished now and it should look like this for its foreseeable future. You can see them all in this Flickr folder.