the good mixer

May 29, 2009June 25, 20092 Comments

#5 of 30. This series is a bit like a mixtape. What goes before and after what is of utter importance. Each mixtape I made was like a story, a soundtrack to my bus journey. I had to get it just right. I still have some of my favourite mixes, and they are perfect to this day. I still half expect some songs, when listening to them on CD or wherever, to cut off just at that point in the riff, just like they do on the tape. Getting the song to begin on the right part of the cassette too, that was a trick. Don’t start recording when it’s that little plastic strip before the tape starts. I used to record from old vinyl at first, big headphones on, the scratchy sound really coming through. From time to time it would be tape to tape, with one of those twin tape decks nobody has any more (I never owned albums on cassette, though – how uncool and against the point! – but I would often tape songs from mixtapes people gave me, oh such quality). Then of course my mixtapes were recorded from CD, sat around a little portable CD player, piles of CD cases around me, notebook in hand, calculating song run-times and moods. On a mixtape, I tended to listen to it all, not just skip through to the songs I knew (like on a mix-CD), so it would have to be done right. Even the decoration of the cassette itself, right down to the writing on the case, had to be just so. Sometimes I would make sure there were just as many songs on each side as would fit on those little lined covers, so you wouldn’t have to look inside the case for the last song. I was a perfectionist.

It seems incredible that the mixtape is now a nostalgia item.

eight arms to hold you

May 28, 2009June 25, 2009Leave a comment

Number 4 in a series. I’ve never liked spiders. Back in junior school this was commonly known, and hilarious people would come up to me with enclosed hands pretending they had spiders to throw at me, claiming to be black widows (really common in north London schools), but their hands were empty, and I would flinch. Of course I’m fascinated by them. There are always the patronising comments, ‘oh leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone’ (I do leave them alone, but they go and build big webs around my back door), ‘they’re more scared of you etc’ (ditto), and those that say ‘oh you should do this or that to cure you of your fear’, but the thing is, fear is nature’s way of saying ‘stay away from the little multi-legged multi-eyed elusive poisonous bugger in the corner’, so I’m glad I have it. I have a toddler, I don’t need black widows crawling about. I do very well to deny their existence, but like Mad-Eye Moody I’m constantly vigilant. And that ‘spider killer’ spray doesn’t work, not at all. They just stand there laughing at me going, oh this smells nice, got any more? Rolled up newspaper on standby. That and a stiff drink (preferably a cup of tea).

you may take our trees

May 26, 2009Leave a comment

Memorial Day. Got out on the bicycle tonight after a trying day, and rode about enjoying the evening warmth. Stopped for a cold beer in downtown Davis, where I sat outside and drew the scene opposite me. And actually included cars! This is important. A couple of years ago I sat in this very spot and drew this very same scene, and purposely left a big space where the carwas, because I don’t really like drawing cars (unless it’s a really cool car, and that is the main thing I’m drawing). And then I went and spilled my little water jar all over my sketchbook. You’ve never seen my hand move so fast. Thankfully nothing was damaged – all is well. Thankfully I live in a dry part of the planet and so didn’t have soggy book syndrome.

Anyway the previous drawing is below. Note how there’s a big tree whose trunk begins bottom right. That tree is sadly gone now. It was enormous, but they chopped it down because it was threatening to fall over and crush you puny humans.

i’m only happy when it rains

May 25, 2009June 25, 20093 Comments

Part 3, of 30. I do actually wear my jumpers in the winter, and my scarves. No, I’ve never been a hot weather person. I do like it when it’s sunny, everything looks more lovely, and you get great shadows on paths and buildings which are too irresistable not to draw. But I don’t like actually being in the sun. I could never lie on the beach waiting for a sun-tan. I’m too pale and freckly, and my eyes too sensitive. When I was a kid, we would holiday in Spain; I would dash from shadow to shadow, and still somehow end up in agonising pain with skin the colour of a lobster.

See, the irony is now that I live in California I don’t actually have to worry about it. In England, you always felt guilty if it was sunny, felt like you had to go outside because tomorrow it might rain, and it might not be sunny again – this one day might just be our summer. Here, if it’s sunny in May it’ll be sunny until November. You can stay inside and out of the heat (very wise), and enjoy the sunshine in your own way (I watch it on the internet, personally). When I lived in Aix, in the South of France, you could always tell where the English lived because their window-shutters would be open. The Provencals on the other hand, they knew to keep them closed, lest the sun get in and turn their apartment into an oven. I made that mistake, and learnt fast. I recall spending several nights sleeping out on the balcony (and fending off pigeons) because it was too hot inside.

The other irony is that nowadays I feel guilty when it rains. I feel like I should be outside getting drenched, like in the old days. Things really are messed up.

not my cup of tea

May 24, 2009June 25, 20091 Comment

Part two of the series, as-yet-unnamed. A name will come (answers on a postcard). So, coffee: I don’t drink the stuff. Can’t stand it. Funny enough I like eating chocolate covered coffee beans (many years ago I worked at Thornton’s Chocolates, in a Galaxy far far away). The whole coffee shop thing, that whole culture, the whole ritual of the big coffee cup in the morning, the smell of it wafting across the office block from cubicle to cubicle, the whole ‘don’t talk to me till I’ve had my coffee’ joke boring people like to have on little signs at their desk, the whole roasted java or colombian blend or rain forest bark weed or whatever they call it, all of that just passed me by. I’m not in the club. I was I’m sure comprehensively and definitively put off by those awful Gold Blend adverts in the late 80s, the ones with that guy out of Buffy (who was later the Prime Minister on Little Britain). Well that and the taste. I am a cuppa tea guy. You can trust a cuppa tea (when I make it, anyhow). Don’t give me infusions and green tea and peach tea and rain forest bark weed tea, just regular PG tips style, ‘ave it, don’t mess about. English greasy spoon cafe. Barry’s Irish tea too, the best teabags.

Funny enough though, I used to work at a coffee shop. At an Asda supermarket, even longer ago. Maybe that story will be a later entry in this series.

rush hour

May 23, 2009May 27, 20101 Comment

Another lunchtime sketch (with purple micron), very quiet on campus right now, and I sat outside the Silo drawing bicycles and fart-boards. Oops, mis-spelling there, I mean frat-boards of course (are they even called that?). They look like a gang. I imagine the frat boards marching animated across campus, independently, gathering to harass bikes. A lot of them seem to be advertising Rush, presumably not a celebration of Ian Rush, though it would be more interesting. Ian Rush, he was great, he drank milk so that he’d be good enough not to play for Accrington Stanley. Funny fact, my A-level history teacher, a Welsh guy, left his teaching job to go and tour with his band who were called, of all things, Ian Rush. They sang in Welsh, and presumably scored a lot too.

get me to the church on time

May 21, 2009May 22, 20092 Comments

I remember drawing this building, Davis Community Church, three years ago, and thinking, I don’t like this drawing much. Its the colours. I finally got round to drawing it again, and while i prefer this I still don’t like the colours much. So I’ve decided it’s not me, it’s the building, it’s the wrong colour. I might write to them and ask them to paint it something else, pink or white or something. I edited out the homeless person who was ambling about the entrance with a trolley, mainly because she wouldn’t stand still but kept wandering off yelling something like ‘get out of my head’. I also edited out the big SUVs parked outside. While I was drawing another one pulled right up and parked in front of me, and out stepped JR Ewing, or his double. I’m surprised I saw any of the church. I actually made most of it up.

but it’s still mightier than the sword

May 20, 2009June 25, 20097 Comments

I started a new series. It’s like the Save the World project, even in the same type of book, but semi-autobiographical. That doesn’t mean part-fiction, it means it’s not going to be the whole story, just some, y’know, miscellaneous details. Semi-attached. Remember those ’25 things about me’ memes that were flying about bloggiverse and facebookville a couple of months ago? Gave me an idea for a new sketchbook-long series. It might be entirely in cobalt copic, until I change my mind after three drawings and use olive green. Expect to see more little things from around the flat. I hope I didn’t draw them all last time round…

Anyway, yes, I hold my pen funny.

if you can’t take the heat

May 19, 20092 Comments

The weather over the weekend was a whopping 104 degrees. Stay inside sort of weather. People from Burnt Oak aren’t cut out for hundred degree heat.

Davisites are used to it though. Californians in general love the sunshine and the heat (I have to laugh when my wife complains that it is cold when it is 65 degrees at 8am), though Central Valley heat is not so loveable, and the heat has come early this year. So I was pleased today that the weather plummeted to a brisk 90 degrees. I braved the chilly weather and poked about downtown during my lunch hour, huddling up for long enough to draw the corner of G and 2nd Streets, in purple micron and wine copic muliliner, before cycling back.

miscellaneous details

May 14, 2009April 6, 20113 Comments

Whew! So I finished (or, more accurately, I stopped) and it is perfectly square. Forget all the ‘de-clutter your home’ books, I’m campaigning for the re-clutter movement.

I’m presenting it in this direction though really you should lay your screen flat on the desk and walk around it. Or up on the ceiling and walk beneath it. Mind nothing falls off, there are some small sharp things in there. I hope you like it. It was laborious this one, and drawn at all eccentric and nonlinear times. My favourite bit is the shoe, my baby son’s shoe. I’ve entered it for a cover design competition; it probably won’t win but it’d be nice if it does.