deli vision

August 25, 2011August 25, 20111 Comment

There is a great little Italian deli in downtown Davis that I can’t believe I’ve never sketched in before. It’s called Zia’s, on 3rd Street (ziasdeli.com), and I occasionally pop in here for a can of that lovely orange San Pellegrino. (now I’ve drawn them before!) It was a hot Saturday afternoon, I had been dropping off fliers for the sketchcrawl at various spots downtown, I was thirsty, and I sat in here and started sketching. They do great sandwiches (they’ve won the ‘best sandwich’ award in Davis), and have a nice selection of Italian biscuits and sweets. They were almost closing up, so when I was done I popped outside to do a quick sketch of the front. The owner of the deli pulled up in his car and commended me on my drawing, which was nice. I commended him on his deli, which is nice too.

underneath the arches

August 24, 20112 Comments

One from London I forgot to post: Admiralty Arch, at the entrance to the Mall. It had been a sunny morning, I had drawn Buckingham Palace and had a nice look at an exhibition of amazing airplane paintings and drawings at the Mall Galleries, speaking to a nice artist who encouraged me to join the British Aviation Artists Guild (I forget the correct name), only problem being I don’t live in Britain any more, and I haven’t drawn that many planes (except my son’s toy planes, of course). Still I really want to draw some, I was inspired by what I saw. I grew up near RAF Musuem at Hendon so I will for sure sketch there on my next trip back (I did attempt to last December, but got caught in that huge blizzard).

I went and sketched Admiralty Arch, standing underneath a huge heavy tree canopy, and a good job too, for it started to bucket down. I kept on drawing all those windows, but was sad that the sunny day had turned so rainy again. Now I remember British summers, I said to myself. I spent the rest of the day getting wet, and bustled about in crowds, and through shops looking for things to bring back home. Next day, I went to Lisbon, and everything was sunny again…

chock-lit

August 23, 2011August 23, 2011Leave a comment

Such a popular Davis place, Ciocolat on the corner of B and 3rd. And yet, I have never actually been there, never so much as walked through the door. One day I will. I do like chocolate after all. I’m juts not much of a cafe person. I was walking back to work one lunchtime last week when I decided I needed to do a very quick sketch.

I do love chocolate though. Give me some Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, or big bar of Milka, I’m well happy mate. Chocolate over here isn’t as good as back home, the commercial stuff anyway (I’m looking at Hershey’s here), but there are some amazing chocolatiers such as See’s Candy and Scharffenbergen, as well as lots of small local ones I don’t even know. But I’ll have a Milky Way too, dunk it in my cuppa tea, I love a bit of chocolate. Funny enough, I don’t drink hot chocolate. I can’t stand the stuff. Nor dark chocolate. Give me a nice big chocolate covered pastry though, pain-au-chocolat, oh yes.

the more i see, the more i know

August 22, 2011August 22, 2011Leave a comment

I wonder how many times I have sketched this building over the past few years? I don’t think I ever sketched it as directly head on as this. The UC Davis Bike Barn, drawn on Strathmore watercolour paper. I actually omitted one element from this drawing, a rather weedy looking mini-tree in the foreground that I didn’t want to draw, as it would take away from the detail of the building. I don’t like the tree anyway. I still miss the bigger tree that used to stand to the left of this drawing, which was a nice place to sit beneath and eat lunch or sketch, until it blew over in a big windstorm back in October 2006 (wow, I’ve been here a while). I remember that day; the smell of grassfires was everywhere, as the wind blew across the tinder-dry landscape (it has been a hellish hot summer), and trees were down, and fire tucks were busy. It’s always a shame when a big tree just goes. So it wasn’t really a shame for me to eliminate the small little tree from the drawing. It’s still there in real life.

It’s another hot Davis summer. Well, when I say hot I mean it’s been in the 90s, so therefore not a hot Davis summer. We’ve hit the hundreds a few times this year but not as often as in the past, thankfully. It’s still pretty toasty when you’re cycling home in it though. I’m not a fan of the heat, though it’s better than the bad weather I’ve had on my last two London trips. I’m Californian now, but still British enough to moan about the weather, hot or cold.

unplugged

August 22, 2011August 22, 20112 Comments

Ever wondered what a fire hydrant looks like befre it’s plugged in? No? Well in case you were, here is one I spotted the other day, along with some others, ready to be inserted into the ground of whatever this new development is. I have cycled past this open space for years, watching the hares bound by and the snakes slither off, while kids on BMX bikes race over the bumpy dirt. however, the buildings have been slowly rising in this neck of Davis, and this land looks soon to be lost. And unusually for Davis it will have red fire hydrants (most of them are yellow, or white/blue on campus, except for a couple of red ones I spotted once). One was already plugged into the ground, like the flag of a conquering civilization (we should have put one on the Moon, that would confuse later generations).
Seen through the fence like this it looks a bit like a prison yard, with the hydrant doing press-ups or something. No, the anthropomorphizing of hydrants is silly (but might make a great comic).

double dutch colonial

August 21, 2011Leave a comment

I have sketched this building before; I like the shape of the roof. Dutch Colonial Revival Gambrel, I seem to recall someone telling me. It’s on 1st Street, and on thursday lunchtime I got out and sketched it, adding the colour later at home. Drawn on Strathmore hot press watercolour paper, micron pen and watercolours.

Here’s the one I did about a year and a half ago (it was winter time then), from a different angle.

you’ll always find us out to lunch

August 20, 2011August 21, 20112 Comments

One from last Saturday. I’m still catching up. This is the other side of the building which used to be old city hall (and a police station, and a fire station, hence the big arches), one I’ve drawn several times. This is now Bistro 33, a fancy (but not too overpriced) restaurant on 3rd Street, Davis. For years I thought it was just called Bistro (are those things supposed to be numbers? Apparently so. I thought they were snakes).

captain sensible

August 19, 2011August 19, 2011Leave a comment

I went to see Captain America last week. It’s funny how the movie companies are now making prequels before they make the main films now (the main film being The Avengers). Before the movie, I sat outside and sketched local Czech pub Little Prague. I’ve drawn the interior several times now but never really the exterior.

The movie was good fun, a little silly in places, but likeable, not ridiculous, not a made-for-3D ‘thrill ride’. some of the trailers before the movie were clearly such – the new Spiderman for example, coming out next year, looked too slick, too obviously 3D orientated, and lacking the personality of the Tobey Maguire Spidey (whose first two movies were great; the third one was dreadful, largely because it was overblown and too interested on spinning your head around a screen while nothing particularly interesting happened, oh a mid-air fight, oh he’s brushing off concrete blocks like they’re made of polystyrene, oh wow a man made of sand, and as for that stupid dance routine…) (that’s why they rebooted). Other trailers I saw, the new Three Musketeers, apparently back in the 18th century there were flying airship galleons that could do battle mid-air (it always has to be mid-air, doesn’t it? Do they think moviegoers can’t stay awake during ground-level scenes any more?); I’m pretty sure they didn’t have those in the original book, but I haven’t read it. My only reference (and come on, probably yours too) is Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds. Don’t ever try to reboot that, that series was a classic. Another trailer was for some doomsday plague virus movie with an all-star cast (they love those genres, don’t they) Then there was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, looks pretty good, Draco Malfoy is in it, so is the Green Goblin’s son, and William Stryker, and the Trinity Killer, oh and Gollum plays the chimp, Caesar the Geezer. Actually at first I thought it was a reboot of Bigfoot and the Hendersons now that they can reboot). I want to see it, mostly because of that shot of the gorilla jumping into a helicopter from the Golden Gate Bridge. Nice try, bananas, but how are you going to fly that thing?

After all of that, Captain America was quite wholesome and satisfying, with proper leather-jacketed and jack-booted nazi/megalomaniacal villainy, and a quite international team alongside the Cap, a ‘coalition of the willing’ if you like. The feel was not hugely ‘American’ in fact, not so much Captain America, but Team Member America. There are other overly patriotic macho nonsense films, so this didn’t need to be – to its credit, I think, but still surprising given that he is, you know, Captain America.

After the movie, I popped into Little Prague to finish off the last bit of colour in the first drawing, and to draw the sketch below. Didn’t spend too long there doing all the details (I have done that before), but captured the atmosphere.

a little more lisboa

August 18, 2011Leave a comment

Views like this just exist to make people feel jealous, I think. Certainly more scenic than Davis! This was sketched on the second evening of the Symposium, from the square outside FBAUL, Lisbon, as the Sun started to set, pouring golden syrup over everything. There’s the 12th Century Sé Cathedral, and the red rooftops of contrasting the turquoise blue of the Tagus River. Below left, the road winds uphill, while the castle of Lisbon lords it over the city below.

Finally, a sketch made during lunch on the first day of the Symposium, an interesting monument in the middle of Largo do Carmo, Chiado.

And this, I think, may be it for Lisbon… I will post a more reflective entry about the symposium, a month on, but that has been a lot of scanning, cropping, posting… I forgot to submit my drawings for the Symposium book (oops!), and in the meantime I have actually been doing a lot of drawing, including some on a trip to Monterey. Keep on sketching…

here am i sitting in a tin can

August 17, 2011August 17, 2011Leave a comment

I think I still have some Lisbon sketches (and a few London ones) yet to show you but in the meantime I’ll fast-forward to the air-travel. I sometimes wish that airports would only happen to other people, or that teleportation devices could be invented a bit more quickly. Until that happens, air travel is the only way I’m getting around the planet. So be it.

I must say that I actually enjoyed flying with US Airways. The planes were comfy with lots of leg-room (better than Virgin, BA and United), even on the domestic flight. I had to change planes, sure, but there are worse places to change than Philadelphia airport, and I was able to fly back into near-to-home Sacramento rather than the miles-away San Francisco.

A word of warning to any flying urban sketchers though – occasionally, just occasionally, your micron pen will burst in mid-air leaving a splat of pure black mess all over your page (and all over you if you’re not careful). I left the mess on there, and in fact blew it about a bit to make an interesting shape, and just drew around it (see top drawing). It just adds to the atmosphere after all, though it looks a bit like a Dementor is serving the coffee.

Prior to getting on that flight, I sketched the last page of my London/Lisbon moleskine, a drawing of the plane itself. and what should be in front of it? A day-glo fire hydrant! since they’re unusual to see in England I was happy to have spotted it. I feel a bit like Bill Oddie sometimes, if Bill Oddie liked fire hydrants and had red hair.

I tell you one thing about Heathrow, for some reason Terminal 1 no longer has a football shirt shop. I was looking for ages for that, and had to make do with looking at William & Kate mugs at the Harrods shop, toy underground trains at the Hamley’s shop and what seemed like one of the last chain record stores in Britain, Heathrow’s branch of HMV, where I picked up (appropriately) the Rocky box-set on dvd for like eight quid. Philadelphia airport has Rocky t-shirts and Clubber Lang shot-glasses and stuff, but didn’t have that, so round one to LHR.

I was pretty exhausted by the time of my final flight (the sixth of the trip), listening to a young guy in the aisle opposite talking to an older lady about all the places he’d visited in Europe, before putting my headphones on, turning up the music and trying to chip my way through A Dance with Dragons (spoiler alert, GRR Martin fans, I’m still none the wiser on this series; I think the butler did it, but GRR Martin is yet to introduce the all-important butler character who will be more important than all the characters you’ve followed for five books, and then kill him off just as you start to wonder if reading his chapters was worth it…). Anyway, after all this travelling, all this sketching, it was nice to get off the plane and be back with my family again.