making all his nowhere plans

February 16, 2024Leave a comment

The start to 2024 has been long and stressful, and full of tiredness and wishing to be far away somewhere with a sketchbook and my headphones on, nowhere that I have to be. But you need the busy times to keep you busy, I could just do with a lot fewer headaches from the rest of the world. My way of handling it is and has always been to go into my sketchbook and draw things, I’ve said before I think it is a way of getting a little control of a small bit of the world by putting it onto some paper. Anyway on this one weekend day of rest, not a lot going on, I went downtown, had a milkshake, and chose a stretch of street I don’t think I’d drawn before, along D Street. It was sunny, and I’m drawn to those big leafless trees at this time of year, with the lovely bark textures. I listen to podcasts when sketching, probably something about the Beatles. I noticed a police car going up and down the street a few times, I don’t think he was looking at me sketching but you always get a bit paranoid. It was a nice day, a lot of people about downtown, pretty much as every other day. All these days blend into one don’t they. Another two-page panorama sketch, another for the book of landscape Davis sketches that I want to make some day. If I ever get there. I remember at a talk I gave years ago a lot of people saying they’d like to see a book just of my Davis sketches, but I still haven’t done it. I just never have the time to figure it out. So I keep drawing instead, and working. I spend a lot of energy trying to solve problems, come up with plans and schemes, try to unlock solutions, but I can never really figure out my own ones. So I keep drawing.

playing with pure pink

February 6, 2024Leave a comment

After the downtown sketchcrawl, I wandered about the shops, and then popped into the Bull’n’Mouth (formerly De Vere’s) for a beer before heading home. I’d really wanted to get another sketch in, and I haven’t really used that ‘pure pink’ pen that much, so I sat by the beer taps and drew those in dark brown, using the pink for the background. It’s one of my uni-ball signo um-151 pens, I have loads of different colours, most of which I only use for the occasional few lines of another sketch. I really liked how the pink and dark brown worked together for the depth. This is always a good sketching subject, the shapes and different areas of light and shade. It didn’t take too long, and I cycled home before it was dark. I had done that big detailed panorama on 1str Street, and this, and a few people sketches, so that was a good day of drawing.

first street, ten years later

February 5, 2024February 5, 2024Leave a comment

Last week, we held our monthly ‘Let’s Draw Davis!’ sketchcrawl down at Davis Commons. It was an overcast day, not rainy as it had been, but not sunny. Colours had to be a nit muted, not as bold. We had a good group of sketchers there of all ages, it was nice to see so many people out with their sketchbooks. I decided that I wanted to revisit a scene that I had drawn exactly ten years ago (ten years and a few days, that is), looking across 1st Street towards where the Natsoulas Gallery and the frat houses are. You can click on the image for a closer view. It has changed a fair bit in that decade (haven’t we all). I stood in pretty much the exact same spot as in 2014, though I think I must have been seated back then. The Natsoulaas has seen some big changes – the large cat outside, as well as the big colourful dog (just offscreen here), where before there was a big colourful man figure. The big frat house next door is still there, but is part of the TKE (Tau Kappa Epsilon) fraternity now. The building to the left of the pole (which I have used as the middle of the page both times) is new, and home to the ΘΞ fraternity (Theta Xi, or ‘The Taxi’ as I’d always say). They used to be in the building TKE is in now, plus a couple of other smaller houses next door, which have been knocked down. Well in my 2014 panorama, they were still there, as you can see below. It was much sunnier in January 2014 too. There were more trees then, but that teensy tree just to the left of the street signs is now a lot taller. Anyway, I was just interested in seeing the change after a decade. I was ten years younger, belly a bit thinner, hair a bit redder, eyes a bit younger, plus a whole load of other physical or personality things I’m not going into now. I’m still drawing in my sketchbook, I don’t know if I’ve realistically improved much but I’m still going. Stop worrying, keep on sketching. The sketchbook is a place to record not so much a place, as a point in time.

I also recorded some people too. While eating lunch (a huge chicken sandwich at a newish eating place I had never seen before) I sketch some people with my brown ink fountain pen. Not a sketchcrawl unless there are a few people sketched. I spent most of my sketchcrawl working on the panorama piece. At the end we all got together and did our usual show and tell. Someone asked if we could put all our sketchbooks on the floor, like they do on other sketchcrawls, but I don’t like that, because the best way to see peoples’ work is not standing nearly six foot above it looking down onto a damp sidewalk. (I also don’t like the feeling of comparison when doing that, always makes me feel a bit shy). I know, I’m a bit of an outsider here not going along with the whole “throwdown” thing, it’s become a tradition now, and people like to get that shot to share on Facebook, but we always like to take a group photo at the end where you see the sketcher with their sketchbook. The thing I always loved with the original Worldwide Sketchcrawls, especially the ones in San Francisco when Enrico Casarosa was doing them, was that at the end you would mingle with other sketchers and look through each others books (because more than likely you would have multiple sketches that you had done, not just one particular page) and just chat with everyone. We’ve kind of evolved into a group show and tell almost by accident, but anyone that doesn’t feel comfortable sharing their sketches doesn’t have to. On my very first worldwide sketchcrawl in 2005 (when my fellow Davis sketchers Alison and Allan were there) I was too shy to even go to the final meet-up. Anyway, we will be holding more Davis sketchcrawls in 2024, dates coming soon.

winter shadows on the old bank of yolo

February 4, 2024Leave a comment

This is one from 3rd St, downtown. I stood across the street, there were some workmen around blocking off part of the street to do some work. I have drawn this building before, it’s some Thai restaurant I think (I’ve never been inside) but historically it was the Bank of Yolo building, at 301 G Street. It’s from 1910, so would have been included in the centenary sketchcrawl I did a few years ago (sketching buildings from 1917 or earlier). I just like the shadows against the walls that those leafless trees cast in January. Right now, it’s February, and a big storm, an atmospheric river maybe, has been rolling through Davis since last night. Well, it started earlier this week, but today is the biggest stormiest part, and there will be a lot more wind tonight. I’ve been indoors most of the time since about Wednesday anyway, give or take a quick excursion out for fresh air, because I’ve been sick with a horrible cold. I’m feeling a lot better now, but I was in bed for a few days there. January seemed to last forever this year, and February is proving to be busy too, and I’ve not even had a chance to start it yet. My sketching productivity is up this year so far though, been filling up those sketchbook pages like its all gonna dry up. I always worry that it might, or that I might hit a wall and just not be motivated to sketch for a while. I’ve had those moments, but I can never really stop drawing. I’m definitely not taking on any commissions or side projects right now, I’m too busy with normal work. I’m organizing sketchcrawls; we had a good one at the end of January and I’m working in dates for the next couple at least. Still, I increasingly find myself going back into a shell in the urban sketching world, I don’t really interact globally as much as I used to. I don’t post to any online groups any more, just my own space. It’s such a big urban sketching world now, there are so many people, groups, communities, I tend to just gravitate to the sketchers I have known for years. I don’t teach workshops or classes, or even take part in big meetups any more, and I find myself getting very shy. My last USk symposium was Amsterdam 2019, that was fun (despite the heat), but it’s been a while. I missed out on Auckland 2023 (being in April), and I will miss out on Buenos Aires 2024 too (it’s in October, I can’t be away then). I should go to another sketching event, maybe. I will. I always get a lot out of them, usually meet and sketch with people that end up inspiring me massively. I don’t know, instead of worrying about being part of the urban sketching world any more I usually just go into my own sketchbook and sketch, and that’s what I tell everyone isn’t it? Forget worrying, just draw? Ignore the noise, just keep on sketching.

on the corner, a break in the rain

January 31, 2024January 31, 2024Leave a comment

A rainy day, the showers stopped for a bit so I took a late lunch and drew the corner of A and 1st. I’ve drawn this corner a few times, they’ve painted this building a few times too. It’s some frat house, Zeta Psi. It’s a whole culture of American university life that we didn’t really have in British universities, not to this extent anyway. I suppose it’s important for stuff, parties on picnic day and beer pong and definitely no hazing. I’ve never been inside a frat house but I imagine it’s either like some gathering of the offspring of wealthy elites with secret codes and fridges of champagne and butlers, or it’s like the house in the Young Ones with bits of old mouldy fruit that talk to socks and Neil the Hippy burning his lentils while Rik the Peoples Poet plans the next protest against fascist pigs. The imagination is probably much better than the reality. You usually see all the new frat and sorority people out and about in large groups in Fall during their ‘Rush’, all dressed up in shiny clothes. As I sketched, the occasional jogger ran by, taking advantage of the break in the rain. I have not yet re-started my own running, I’ve been a little bit lazy on that front. I have the Davis Stampede coming up too, and need to prepare for it more. I had a lot on my mind this day, I often do, the world weighing down, hard to understand. One of the reasons I draw I think is to gain a tiny bit of control over the world around me, as if I can hold it in my hand, but maybe I’m over analyzing it, maybe I just like to draw because I really like drawing. This day was my son’s 16th birthday which was a scary thought too, and my own birthday is coming up soon which always makes me fill with a little dread. Every birthday I’ve had in my 30s and 40s has been spent over here, I’ve not had a birthday in England since my 20s, and those 20s seem like a very distant memory now. Ah well, we move along with time, it’s just not always that fun.

go tell it to the trees

January 31, 2024Leave a comment

It’s still January, if you can believe it. It’s been a productive month sketching-wise. I wonder what the point of it all is, all this sketchbooking, but then I remember last January, all those trees that came down, it’s not like the trees got rebuilt or anything, they are gone forever. The big old trees have really interesting shapes and textures at this time if year, when they are free of all those leaves that give us much needed shade in the hot summer, now they open up to provide light. So I am continuing in my documentation of these large living beings, they are worth a look. This one is outside California Hall, the new lecture hall built a few years ago (it’s in the sketchbooks), with the outline of Kerr Hall in the background. I keep thinking of that Pulp song “Trees” when sketching trees, and that album “We Love Life”, their last proper album as a band from back in 2001. That was quite a long time ago now, but it always makes me think of the year spent in Aix-en-Provence when I first heard it. I liked it a lot, but it’s more what the sound of the music brings me back to I guess, and I think of the chilly mornings walking my usual route to the Faculté des Lettres along streets with bare plane trees and the occasional dog poo, to teach my classes in English. The taste of a fresh poulet-frites for dinner. Completely different life, I can barely remember much of it now. Looking on Google Street View, it looks like the old ‘Fac’ has been demolished and replaced with a new modern building, which looks a lot nicer. No doubt if I’d been there, I would have drawn it all being knocked down and then being built. Looking at this sketch, that tall Kerr Hall behind was where my current department used to live before our new building (shared with Math) was built, just before I arrived. Time moves along, the trees just watch it all go by.

every day we take another step

January 30, 2024January 29, 2024Leave a comment

Another Sunday where I pushed myself to get out of the house, during a lull in the January rain we have been having. The rain is nothing like last year when all the trees came down, but we’ve been getting some good showers to help grow the grass and keep the hills green. This panorama sketch is on 3rd St, on that stretch between B St and A St leading up to the entrance of the university. It was all refurbished several years ago with a big obelisk made out of bike parts placed in the middle, and several of those wooden cylindrical noticeboards plopped along the sidewalk. That had to be my foreground item in this sketch. My eye was drawn to one of the notices advertising a local band called ‘Mondaiji’, whose guitarist is a colleague of mine in the Stats department. They have been getting a number of gigs in Davis, I’ve still not been able to see them play but hopefully can some time. The other buildings in this view are ones I have drawn multiple times over the years, it’s not an unfamiliar view this. The white building on the left might be the oldest house in Davis, the Eggleston Home from c. 1870. Well, the Werner-Hamel house in south Davis is older (c. 1859), but if it’s just downtown I think this one takes the prize, though there are a few others from around that time still about such as the Cloud Forest Cafe building oon D St, also c. 1870. Remember when I did that centenary sketchcrawl back in 2017? Here’s the info and map: https://petescully.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ldd-map-handout-march2017.pdf. We should do that again. I like how this panorama turned out, even on a fairly dreary mid-January Sunday. It started raining again, so I finished the penwork, cycled off, and coloured in at home with a nice cup of tea.

sunday kickaround

January 29, 2024Leave a comment

While out one Sunday during a break in the rain, I noticed a load of men playing soccer on the field by the university. I’ve passed by them before and noticed a few good football shirts among them, this time I decided to watch for a bit, and since it’s been a while, I tried sketching the players in motion. I say in motion, I mean it wasn’t as fast paced and fluid as the old AYSO United games played by quick teenagers, and on a smaller field, but sketching with my black fountain pen I did still struggle to get the ink moving along into people shapes. This was a good test of that pen, not so much the brown ink but the carbon platinum pen which I have often shied away from while out and about, it was a bit of hard work. So I got my thicker Zebra pen and added some thicker more defined outlines to some of them, and that pen felt more comfortable. It’s funny, a couple of years ago I’d have probably felt I could join in and make an impact, but these days since quitting soccer coaching and not having a ball at my feet I shy away from it more. I had a kickaround with my son a few weeks back and my foot hurt kicking the ball, that had never happened before. I’m not completely unfit (though I’m taking my time getting into training for the upcoming runs I’m doing) but definitely a bit shy when it comes to sports. Many of the guys were younger but a lot of the guys were a good bit older than me. There was one bloke who was a bit shouty at his team-mates, even though this was just a kickabout he seemed to yell at them for not choosing the right pass or not switching play or whatever, though he seemed happy to lump it off the field. Still it was good seeing all the playing styles, but I just wanted to see the kits. One was wearing a white pinny but I could tell he had underneath the 2014 Spurs black away kit, an absolute belter of a kit which I do not have (but my son had when he was six, he wore it the first time he visited White Hart Lane). Much respect. Another guy wore the 2020 Ghana away kit, the yellow one, much respect to that because I have the white home kit from the same year. There were a couple of old Chelsea kits I think, a USA away from about five years ago, a cool black Mexico kit, a black and grey Warrior-era Liverpool shirt, at least one Italy training shirt, and one other football shirt that I did not recognize, which is always quite exciting to me, I think it was a Celta Vigo away kit but I could not be certain. Finally there was a guy in a kit I recognized immediately, the 2002 blue Arsenal away kit, the one with the funny geometric pattern on the front, with that dreaded name ‘Pires’ on the back. Dreaded because as a Spurs fan, Pires was bloody devastating for Arsenal and one of the reasons they were so annoyingly good back then. He had that little stripe beard under his lip didn’t he, which I actually also had in around 1999, because ‘the 90s’. It brought back some memories, seeing that name on a shirt. Anyway, it was fun watching some Sunday muddy kickaround footy.

here comes the sunscreen

January 28, 20243 Comments

I probably should have posted this with my Maui sketches, but it was done after I got back. This is the special mineral-based sunscreen that it’s required to wear in Maui county, particularly if going in the ocean. The other stuff might be alright, but this stuff is supposed to be a lot better for the corals and stuff. I probably didn’t need the SPF 50 stuff, but you can’t be too careful I suppose, and I have had a skin issue in the past couple of years. The SPF 50 stuff is like thick bloody paste though, it’s so white and impossible to wash off, which is I suppose the point. In the evening after I had showered, I did surprise myself that I had a much more silvery stubble than I actually have, but it was just the sunscreen caught in all my bristles, despite a fairly robust scrubbing of the chin. I still think my ear caught a bit of sun, as it was feeling pretty sore on top after a swim in the ocean. I remember back to being a kid, back in the bad old days of the mid-80s, and being the only red-haired freckly one in my immediate family. We went to Spain, and back then what was considered sun protection was like factor 4, or factor 6 if you’re lucky. I wanted factor 10 but I swear everyone was just laughing at me. Half the time there’d be none whatsoever. It was called sun-tan-lotion because it was for exactly that, getting a sun-tan, it was little more than putting butter on before going into the oven. Fine for those whose skin turned brown, but not for the likes of me. When I was ten we went to Spain for the first time, to Ibiza, and I remember a few days in I had already been burnt so badly that I could not move, and had to lie in bed crying my eyes out in absolute agony. Cheers mum and dad! They would have to put that awful smelly calamine lotion on my skin to soothe it. Or natural Greek yoghurt! Yes they would put Greek yogurt on my sunburn. Of course I was always made to feel like some sort of freak for not wanting to go into the sun, and wanting to stay indoors in the shade in the hottest part of the day in Spain (you know, like the Spanish do). I remember a big argument with my mum about it on the second time we were in Ibiza, when I was 11, and I ended up staying in by myself and drawing football shirts, which was totally fine by me. My dad was not red-headed, but he would put practically no sun protection on at all, and then lie outside in the sun until he turned into a lobster. It was a different time wasn’t it, a different generation, and a very British/Irish thing to do. “Aren’t you looking well!” they would say when you came home burnt to a crisp. If you avoided the sun and tried not to get burnt they would laugh at you for being so milky white and say that you wouldn’t know you’d gone to Spain. Different times. Now I, the sun-avoider, live in California of all places! But in California, most people I know avoid the sun and do what they can not to be burnt by it, and they all seem to understand red hair and freckly skin is a lot more sensitive. I still get burnt, if I’m out too long, even with sunscreen and hats and long sleeves. Anyway this was a fun story.

Dreary January Sunday

January 27, 2024Leave a comment

One of those weekend days when it’s dreary out, and I struggle to leave the house. The only thing to do is go out and draw, but some days I don’t really want to draw any more of Davis, because I’ve done it all before. I had to get outside for a little bit though, or else I’d go mad, but I have to push myself out sometimes. It’s that January feeling. So I walked over to the park, and stood next to the Davis Arts Center, and drew that. It’s undergoing some refurbishments by the look of it. It was cold out, and when I’d drawn all the ink I walked back home to colour it in, and put an old James Bond film on the telly. I never watch James Bond, they all feel the same to me, but I fancied a bit of that silliness so I watched Goldeneye, for a bit of mid-90s action. Didn’t really spur me into much action myself though.