let’s draw london!

April 26, 20124 Comments

Next month I will be back in my home town of London, to see the people I miss so much, and also to do a bit of drawing. I will be a guest blogger on the recently launched Urban Sketchers London website, and so I am pleased to be organizing a sketchcrawl on Saturday May 26 around the historic Temple and Fleet Street areas. Why not join in? Let’s draw London!

The sketchcrawl will begin at 10:30am, meeting outside Temple tube station. All you need is something to draw with and something to draw on, and this event is free and open to everyone, artists and sketchers of all levels. What better way to explore the hidden nooks of your city than with a sketchbook? It’s only half about the drawing, it’s also about the looking, the act of observation through which you build a relationship with your surroundings. Plus it’s great fun to sketch with others!

There will be a midway point at 1:00pm outside Temple Church for those who come late or leave early, and the sketchcrawl will finish at 4:00pm in Gough Square, by the statue of Dr.Johnson’s cat. It’s just off of Fleet Street, but like a scavenger hunt you’ll enjoy finding it! There we will look at each others’ sketchbooks, and then maybe pop into the old Cheshire Cheese for a pint.

I hope to see you there!

‘Let’s Draw London’ Facebook event page

‘the house!’

April 24, 20122 Comments

This is The House, a building at UC Davis near the tri-co-operatives, a part of campus I had not explored before today. I cycled around there looking for something to sketch, and found this pleasant little spot. (I sound like Alan Whicker or someone) The House is home to CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services), who do a great and necessary job on campus. The House has an imaginative name (a bit like The Barn, sketched recently), but I keep imagining it being bellowed by Christopher Lee, “The House!”

hotting up

April 23, 20122 Comments

Still adjusting to the new house. This weekend gave us the hot weather test. Davis is a place where it gets hot, very hot, and I’m not joking. Just not usually this early! Mid-90s weather came out of nowhere, disguised in mid-80s forecasts, just in time for Picnic Day (and it always feels hotter in Picnic Day crowds). That’s mid-90s as in Fahrenheit, not as in Britpop. On Saturday we sweltered, but by Sunday, another scorcher, we’d figured it out. It’s starting to cool down again now, so this was just a dress rehearsal for the real stuff in July. Come on Davis Summer, do your worst.

know what i mean harry?

April 23, 2012April 23, 20125 Comments

Do you know the difference between Basil Fawlty and Victor Meldrew? There is a broad range of character defects between the two but I’ve narrowed it down to this – things tend to happen to Victor, without them necessarily being his fault, whereas Basil’s woes are almost always entirely his fault and pretty preventable. As the episode of Fawlty Towers goes on you see him diggin further and further into a hole which it is almost impossible to get out of, and you can just tell is going to get worse. So what about Harry Redknapp?

I won’t go into the story, footy fans know it, non-footy fans have turned off already. Harry has been great for Spurs and may continue to be but this England job thing hangs over the whole club. Sure the FA are waiting on their decision – but I think it might make things a lot easier if Harry actually came out and said if he will or will not take it if offered. Spurs’s season since this whole thing came up has resembled an episode of Fawlty Towers (at least, I can’t get the image of Basil/Harry falling off the ladder trying to ‘look at girl in room’, that being the champions league), and wondering whether this business-end-of-season-collapse is Harry’s fault for not committing or the FA’s fault for not asking. That is, is Harry a Basil or a Victor?

Hmm. If someone had said to me in mid February when we were nine points clear of Arsenal that two months later we’d be six points behind them and sinking, I’d have said “I don’t believe it!” Now I keep imaging Harry picking up a puppy instead of a phone.

student community center

April 20, 2012April 20, 20122 Comments

A newer building on campus, the new Student Community Center, opposite the Silo. Sketched yesterday lunchtime. There has been a lot of redevelopment in this part of campus since I came to Davis. Drawn with a copic fineliner (fairly well used) in the gamma S&B sketchbook. Decided against colour.

The weather is heating up, it was 88 degrees in Davis yesterday and very warm at night. Picnic Day – tomorrow – will be a warm one this year…

quick draw first street

April 19, 2012April 19, 20121 Comment

Needed a quick sketch yesterday lunchtime after chowing down at Habit Burger, a place which does great big chicken burgers for sure but they don’t half like talking and repeating back everything that you have ordered (including pointing out the things that you did not order like teriyaki sauce) both when you order and when you pick it up. Handy for some, I’m sure, but I’m not a patient man, I just want to pay and eat. They are quick to make it though, and boy it is good when you get it, so you want to savour it. All of which means I have a smaller window to sketch within. Still you can get a lot of information across in a short amount of time. I stood opposite Firts Street Real Estate, a building I’ve never drawn but is very sketchworthy, and scribbled along in purple pen, adding some colour, the whole thing took about 20 minutes before I had to run back to the office.

move, adjust, settle

April 18, 2012April 18, 20126 Comments

First sketches in the new house in north Davis. It takes time to settle in.

dog and bone

April 17, 20125 Comments

Remember when we used to use public phones? God, we were dumb! Putting our coins in, talking for a bit, putting more coins in, hunting woolly mammoth; it’s so much better now we live in the future with our iPhones and blueteeth and hoverboards. There is a living relic of this ancient past on G Street, complete with a ‘phonebook’ (which doesn’t even have a search box, and people have clearly been writing their names on it to try). I have been meaning to draw this for a while, so I drew it during the sketchcrawl on G Street last Saturday. This being a historic neighbourhood, I can imagine it being used by early farm settlers, gold prospecters, maybe even local Native American tribes (before the invention of the smoke-signal app, obviously). I drew this in the Stillman and Birn gamma sketchbook, with a Micron pen and Cotman watercolours, and it took a little under an hour.

gee! let’s draw G street

April 16, 2012April 16, 2012Leave a comment

On Saturday, after a week of storms and rain and puddles, the sun came out and so did the sketchers, for the latest “Let’s Draw Davis” sketchcrawl. There were fourteen of us in all, and we met at the corner of 2nd and G Streets. The location of this crawl was along G street, which is a historic part of old downtown Davis, and makes for some properly ‘urban’ sketching. I took a while sketching the above scene, that big old white building on the northwest corner of G and 2nd, chatting to folk as they passed by. One guy I spoke to was back in Davis for the first time in 40 years, having lived there in the late 60s and early 70s, and so I was interested to hear about how Davis was back then, as he was interested to hear how I felt it was now. Below, a couple of international sketchers (from Spain and from Iran), both sketching the ‘Froggies’ bar opposite.

Above, an interesting iron fence nearby to Ace Houseware, plus a fire hydrant on 5th and G and the brand new bank building opposite. I didn’t sketch quite as much as I would have expected (and there’s one sketch of a phonebox I’ll post separately because I want to say some hilarious things about phoneboxes), largely because I was getting a little frustrated with my Micron pens, which don’t like the Stillman & Birn paper as much as I might have liked, at least not in the way I use them. I felt like I was wearing them down much more quickly than usual. Still it was good to get out and draw stuff, and I was amazed at how productive some of my fellow sketchers were. We all met up outside the Davis Co-Op at 3pm (which in hindsight was a long way to go for a fairly short sketchcrawl), and checked out each other’s books, which is always one of the most fun parts of the day.

Sketchbooks at the end of the day...

To see some of the other sketchers’ work, please go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/letsdrawdavis/, the Flickr group. The next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be in May…date and place to be determined. If you can’t wait that long, this coming Saturday April 21 is Worldwide Sketchcrawl #35, in which hundreds or maybe thousands of sketchers across the planet will get out and draw their cities, and it sounds like there will be one in Davis too (I might make it the tail end, as I’ll be going to Picnic Day before that).

In the meantime, you may like to know we now have a Let’s Draw Davis page on the Davis Wiki, set up by fellow long-time Davis sketcher Pica (who produced the amazing accordion sketchbook above).

and like a true nature’s child

April 13, 2012Leave a comment

Saw this Honda motorbike parked outside Bainer Hall today. After massive wake-you-up-at-night rain, the Sun came out at lunchtime, and so did the sketchbook (Stillman & Birn gamma one). I stood and drew, until the glare of the Sun started to make me squint so badly, and my eyes were heavy anyway from my allergies (and from the wake-you-up-at-night rain waking me up at night), then they started to stream like the Tigris and Euphrates. People probably thought I was a bit mental, crying while drawing, but I wasn’t really crying. Still the glare was getting to me so I put my hood on and crouched over the paper (and I look odd when I draw normally). I laboured on, trying to get every, um, axel, er, metal machinery bit (I am not an engineer, unlike the folks in Bainer Hall). And get this – by the end of the drawing, it had started raining again! Wouldn’t you know.

Tomorrow my eyes and the weather will all be fiunctioning perfectly once more, because it’s the next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl, on G Street. Meet us at 10:30am on the corner of 2nd and G. See you there!