Here are some sketches drawn around campus last month, all different media, I suppose. Above, that’s the UC Davis water tower as seen from the Arboretum, very close to my office. I drew in brown fountain pen, and there was this little cat on the path. I like this sort of sketch. The redbuds were really glowing then too. I’ve been on this campus eighteen years now, I sometimes look back and think, funny how that happened. That building next to the water tower, the Earth and Physical Sciences Building, wasn’t even there when I first arrived, in fact I was there at the ceremony where they laid the foundation stone, my old manager insisted I come over to witness that. I’m glad I did, but I always regret not sketching the building that was there before, which was knocked down. I do remember sketching the empty space, back in 07 or 08.

There was this one day last month when one of my coworkers announced that there would be llamas on campus, over at the Quad, that people could go and have a look at. This caused great excitement, as it had been a very busy 2024 so far, and everyone needs more llama, less drama. So we all walked over there. I had my llama jokes ready. It was lunchtime so I thought, alpaca lunch. As we got there, it turned out there were no llamas to be found. I guess they hadn’t set their a-llama clock. Disappointed but not despondent, I decided to draw this interesting old tree, and sketched it in pencil before adding some watercolour. I sometimes wish all my sketching looked like this, it felt very free. 

This one above was sketched in the UC Davis Silo, on another boring lunchtime. I haven’t drawn the interior of this building from this level for a number of years. I used to come up here all the time, years ago, it feels like something from another time, but it isn’t, it’s just a different end of the same time. I think I would wonder in those days how long we would be in Davis, where we might go next, but we stayed, and I took it upon myself to draw all the changes here over a long period. While it’s not my actual job, it’s kind of become my other job, and I don’t mind that at all.

And finally, a panorama that will remain unfinished. I was cycling across campus one lunchtime when I was hit with the thought of drawing the Chemistry Building, not the side that’s all being built (and which I have drawn a number of times), because the shapes the shadows were making as they hit the inset windows was really quite dramatic, you would have loved it. In the end I said sod it, too much detail, and focused on sketching that wicked blue and cloudy sky, which was pretty spectacular in itself, leaving the Chemistry Building to be nothing more than a big outline left to the imagination. Behind it though is another building called ‘PSEL’, the ‘Physical Science and Engineering Library’, which is not in fact a library any more but has been recently redeveloped to house space for several units, including my own program (in fact I’m on the building committee that manages it); it will see a name change at some point, though I can’t say for sure what that will be. There’s still work being done, and I have drawn the building before, but I’ll do a more proper sketch of it at some point, but I made sure it got into this sketch.