d’you wanna pizza me?

September 25, 20112 Comments

I don’t eat pizza very often, and I don’t ever get pizza from here, but Woodstock’s is one of those Davis staples, and a student favourite. On Friday lunchtime I was not sure what to sketch, and in the end I left it too long to decide. I stopped on G Street and drew a quick ten minute thumbnail of this well-known pizzeria, with the intention of coming back and doing a bigger drawing. I came back downtown this afternoon and sat out on G Street sketching. That’s a sushi place next door, very popular. I don’t eat sushi.

Here’s a note. I drew this on Canson Montval watercolour paper (the main one; the thumbnail was in my watercolour moleskine), with a micron pigma pen, but decided to use the very thin nibbed uniball signo for the bricks. I’ve used it recently with drawings that were subsequenty given a wash and had no problem, but this time, my initial issue with the pen happened again and it bled. I don’t mind too much because it toned down the bricks a bit, but nonetheless i had not expected it. I guess when you leav it for a few hours, it doesn’t bleed, but when you add a wash right away it does. Interesting to know.

hoe does your gaarden grow

September 23, 2011September 23, 20114 Comments

Beer. A great thing to drink on yet another very very hot day, when work has kept you busy (also a very good thing to drink while the season opener of Gray’s Anatomy is on in the same room). I used to like drinking Hoegaarden when I was in Belgium, and in fact was given a set of Hoegaarden glasses and beers, from the various types they make, as a parting gift by some Belgian friends. Wow, that was more than eleven years ago. This is one of those very glasses (though the beer is newer). Drinking it does remind me of Belgium, of Blokker and Inno and Champion (they’re shops, not greyhounds), of squared paper notebooks and crazy drivers, of warm cosy pubs and freezing cold rainy walks home, of phonecards and mitraillettes de dinde, of sitting on trains and trams just for the pleasure of reading a book. You can imagine me at a beer tasting festival. “Ah yes, this one has a fruity aroma, with a hint of waiting half an hour to use a cashpoint and then stepping in dogpoo.” Funny thing is, I didn’t drink Hoegaarden that often, I usually drank Fruit Defendu (made by them, though) or Leffe, perhaps a nice cold a Maes or occasionally my favourite, Charles Quint. I love a Kwak too. Mmm, that one has a nutty palatte, an aroma of that time when my mate Tel came over and downed one too quickly, and the room started to spin and he spent the next hour and a half in the toilet before wandering home in the snow. Happy times!

Sketched in my ‘bottle and glass brown paper sketchbook’. That name has nothing to do with cockney rhyming slang, by the way.

…but some of us are looking at the stairs

September 22, 2011September 22, 20113 Comments

Lunchtime, and I decided to draw this building (back of North Hall, UC Davis) again, having done some of it last Saturday. This time I used to uni-ball signo brown-black pen on creamy Canson paper. It makes it look almost wintery, doesn’t it. Your eyes can decieve you, don’t trust them (I heard a wise man say that somewhere, far far away). This week, though they are calling it Fall, Summer is giving us a last hefty whack, with temperatures in the upper 90s and low 100s. Some days it’s too hot to draw. On this day, I found a nice spot in the shade. I always do though.

she’s not quite right and she don’t fit in with the small town

September 21, 201112 Comments

This one was a bit of a bugger. This phonebox (and I know I’ve drawn phoneboxes more than once lately) is on D street, it’s the ‘other’ Davis one. Authentically British (no phone, no glass in the windows), the Giles Gilbert Scott masterpiece and distant cousin of Waterloo Bridge adds to Davis’s quirky and vaguely Britophile character (there’s the phoneboxes, the old London double-decker buses, and that handsome red-head guy who draws the fire hydrants). Shes just decoration, really. My son and I pretend she’s a rocket ship. She’s a space oddity, standing outside the Mustard Seed. Anyway, last week I went downtown, sat down here to draw her, got everything ready and then realized I had left my pencil case in my office. D’oh. So I went and got a couple of new microns at the Paint Chip, and decided to draw something else, but for some unknown reason I couldn’t, I was feeling derailed. So I came back next day, and sat and drew as much as possible, in this very detailed spot. I finished off the remaining details and colours at home, but for some reason I’ll always have an awkward feeling about this one, like I was never comfortable, took too long, maybe irritated by drawing another phone box. But here she is, a little piece of the homeland relocated to Davis. I would say I know how she feels, but I’m not a phonebox, I’m a person.

my little green friend

September 21, 20116 Comments

Toad Hollow, Davis, an amphibian ghetto near the post office, by the Pole Line Road flyover.It is the entrance to a tunnel which allows toads (and frogs, no discrimination here) (but not newts, coming over here, nicking our jobs and our lilypads). This is a much beloved spot in Davis, one of our quirkier details, the story of which I’ve written about before here. The flags are up, I think they were for September 11 but am not sure. Notice how they have little solar panels, very eco-friendly, it is easy being green in this town. You never see a toad driving an SUV. You see people who look like toads driving SUVs, maybe. If Davis toads could drive, I can just imagine their bumper stickers. “Hop springs eternal”, “Stop the Wart”, “The only Romney I like is a Marsh”, etc etc

the last days of summer

September 18, 20112 Comments

This hydrant is by Wright Hall, UC Davis, and I drew it at the end of yesterday’s sketchcrawl. Well I drew most of it there, and then finished it off at home, adding colour too. I drew it on a 8×10 piece of Strathmore hot press paper in uniball vision micro, so it’s bigger than what goes in my sketchbook. I have had my eye on this fire hydrant for a while, sitting among the long leaves, with the colourful theatre dept building and the Eggheads outside the Art building behind it. It’s so calm, but tomorrow the new academic year will begin, and so will the craziness…

another day spent sketching uc davis

September 17, 2011September 18, 20111 Comment

Another “Let’s Draw Davis!” sketchcrawl, this time on the UC Davis, an eerily quiet UC Davis, the calm before the very big storm of new students. We were a smaller group this time, but no less determined to sketch, and there was a lot to draw on campus. We met at the Memorial Union bus station, by the red phone box, and fanned out to sketch the campus.

Above is North Hall, a building I’ve attempted before, the one with the fun-to-draw staircase. Below, Alan and Alison, long-time Davis sketchers, sketching at the MU bus terminal.

The next one will be on October 15th. Stay tuned for details!

saucony shoe

September 16, 2011September 15, 20112 Comments

After a gap, back to the series in which I am drawing every one of my son Luke’s shoes. I still have a way to go to catch up, but I will get there. They are all being drawn in a single small Moleskine cahier in the same black pen style. this one is number 17, I think (the 16th was number 18, while the 17th was number 16, so this is the 18th drawn, but 17 in chronological order in which they were worn…does not compute, does not compute… ah Luke won’t care in years to come). These trainers, made by Saucony (that’s what it says, don’t ask me), are cool, dark blue and silver with some orange trims, and they are special because they are the first shoes that he actually chose himself. The baby-shoe book is becoming the little-boy-shoe book. I think I’m gonna need a bigger book.

the o.c.

September 15, 2011September 15, 20112 Comments

I decided it was about time I drew this, the entranceway to Orange Court off E Street in Davis. It’s a little courtyard of restaurants and cafes and small businesses (I drew inside here once last year). I’m interested in these off-strip places in Davis, the interstitial spaces, the alleys and courtyard, and in fact the October sketchcrawl will largely focus on those places, I think. There are some interesting spaces behind the main buildings. Further up E Street, there are some cool little shops and cafes hidden away between the Pence Gallery and Bizarro Comics. For this drawing, which again is on slightly larger Strathmore hot press paper as part of my latest Davis series, I stood by my bike in a little bit of shade on Tuesday lunchtime and drew most of it, finishing off details and the colour when I got home.

shakespeare’s in the alley

September 14, 2011September 14, 2011Leave a comment

This is actually on the other side of the funky looking ‘Secretariat’ building on G Street that I drew last week. I’ve wanted to draw this alley, just off 4th, for a long time but always forget about it. That balcony area is so unusual; hardly Romeo and Juliet, unless Romeo was an old tomcat or something. I kept in the graffiti. Never understood the whole tagging thing – unless the graffiti artists are old tomcats or something – why do they have to be so illegible? It’s a bit like when you first learn to do a signature, it makes you feel all grown-up, writing your name in a barely legible way.

Another bigger one on Strathmore hot-press paper, latest in the series. Yep, it’s a series, just not in a sketchbook.