is it a bird? is it a plane? no, it’s…a pipe

November 8, 2010November 8, 20103 Comments

More pipeage. This colourless specimen above is rather like an industrial era Oliphaunt. This could become a story book for children, ‘the Pipes of Davis’, rather like that book ‘the Toads of Davis’. Although, perhaps the more hippy side of our town might take a different meaning of the word ‘pipe’ and be disappointed to find it’s just all fire hydrants and gas pipes. I wouldn’t market it to the hippies, then. I’m not sure what the story would be about, though. Maybe they could all be super heroes that put out fires, perhaps the gas pipes are the wicked industrial villains who start them, and the super-mutant-ninja-hydrants all save the day.

Like these ones for example, they are outside the Center for Neuroscience. Well there’s a super-hero origin story just waiting to happen. All you need is a cape and a wicked laugh. I liked the look of these though, they were like a futuristic space-station or deep-ocean lair.

This bottom one, though, is small, rather like a simple droid or a techno-hobbit, found on the corner of 3rd and E Streets. I like this one. I sketched it late on Saturday afternoon, when shadows were getting long.

on a steel horse i ride

November 7, 20102 Comments

Continuing the hydrants, gauges and pipes theme – I will fill an entire sketchbook with these, by the way – for NaNoDrawMo, some of those big big pipes you see all over the place in Davis. They remind me of animals, some elephants, others, horses, others rhinos. Or metal camels.

I feel like a zoologist, but for metal pipes. All of them go into the ground and lead somewhere else. A map of the world by its pipes only would be an interesting map, rather like a drawing of a person only by their veins and arteries.

let’s draw davis again

November 6, 2010November 5, 2010Leave a comment

Time for another sketchcrawl, I think. If you’re local and fancy coming out for a day of sketching downtown Davis, meet us at 11:00am outside the Davis Amtrak Station (2nd and H Streets). We’ll sketch from there down 2nd Street, with its historic buildings and interesting shops, then turn down E Street, before crossing 1st Street and finishing at Davis Commons, outside Borders (or inside their cafe area if you’re cold). All are welcome! Just bring something to draw with and something to draw on!

If you need any more information, please comment below or send me a message. And if you’re on Flcikr, please join the Flickr group “Let’s Draw Davis!”. And if you’re on Facebook (as so many are), I’ve even set up an event page you can RSVP to.

So come and sketch with us on the 21st! We’ll even sketch if it rains…

we must not look at goblin men

November 5, 2010November 5, 20102 Comments

Expect to see a lot more fire hydrants, sprinkler gauges, gas pipes and other important functional metal poles that stick out of the ground on this site for the next month. I’ve decided to take up the challenge of “NaNoDrawMo“, which like its more famous father NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an offshoot for drawing only. The task is 50 drawings in one month, November. I decided that it might be nice to theme my drawings for this project, and sketch only things in my hydrants/gas pipes/etc category. Here are the first eight, all from UC Davis.

I particularly like #3, an unusual one, rather like the White Worm poking its way out of the ground. Do you remember that film, Lair of the White Worm? Hugh Grant swashing some buckle, Peter Capaldi before he learnt to swear, Catherine Oxenburg being all Countryfile, plus of course Amanda Donohoe slinking about; naturally my teenage self loved it. Now I draw fire hydrants.

As I’ve remarked before, they remind me of little gnomes, or dwarves, or goblins, with their funny coloured hats. Or droids. The hydrants on campus tend to be white with blue trim. It’s likely that I’ll draw many which look identical, but I think they all have character. Well, most of them. Well, some of them. Maybe.

And then there are these two fellows, in red. Up Periscope on the left looks like a character from Button Moon, while on the right that is I think a Sprinkler Gauge. Actually, I have no idea whatsoever. Sprinkler Gauge? They may not even exist. I just guessed at the name. Either way, it’s behind the library. Many more to draw yet – and I’m planning on filling a whole book, a small Cachet watercolour book, which rips my nibs up but loves paint. NaNoDrawMo? November is already looking that much shorter.

alright at the back

November 3, 20102 Comments

I went to a presentation at work about mailing lists, and I just had to do a quick sketch while sat at the back. I had my blue Cachet watercolour sketchbook with me (which I’ve never really used, but am now using to draw fire hydrants in). Now I know some new things. One is that this rougher watercolour paper is a bugger on your pens.

take me down to the station

October 31, 2010November 1, 20102 Comments

The eleventh spread of the Davis moley, only 1.5 spreads left! It was a bright and sunny Halloween day, warm to boot, and so I went down to the historic Davis Amtrak Station and sat in the sunlight (wearing my Giants cap – hey, no bandwagon-jumping here, I’ve had that for over eight years) (when they were last in the World Series). I sat beside a yellow fire hydrant, which just had to get in there somewhere. And spiderwebs! It’s that time of year here in Davis, when long strands of spiderweb float annoyingly from every tree, lamp-post, fire-hydrant; they just float around in the air, sometimes carrying little spiders with them. I had a few little spiders crawl over my page while drawing this. Well, it is Halloween.

and gathering swallows twitter in the skies

October 30, 20102 Comments

Spread 10 of the Davis Moleskine… this is a funeral home on D Street, sketched from outside the Cafe Mediterranee opposite. I’m struggling to get these sketches in at the moment, splitting them over lunchtimes on different days (they seem to take me longer than usual, I’m still getting used to drawing larger and using these Pitt pens and this paper). I only have two and a half spreads left though! And I think I know what I’m going to draw.

The weather has changed here though. It’s now cold, there is rain, the long-awaited jumpers are out and at last it feels like autumn. Amazing to think that just a couple of weeks ago, it was pushing a hundred degrees.

A funeral home…reminds me of Six Feet Under, that was an enjoyable show to watch, back when we watched it. Never did see the last ones though. We watch Dexter now, that is a great show.

giant steps

October 29, 20101 Comment

There’s a funny old game over here that people quite like, called ‘baseball’. The thing about baseball that I like, apart from the fact that its name doesn’t get confused with that of another more globally popular sport, is the uniforms they wear. They are so classic looking, untroubled by sponsors or the need to change designs every few months. Usually, teams will play in white with their opponents in grey, although soemtimes they will use their other colours – the San Francisco Giants for example sometimes play in black, and even orange, being their colours. Usually (but not always) the home team will wear their nickname (“Giants”, “Yankees”, etc) across their jersey, while the away team would have the name of their city. This classic look reinforces the classic feel of the game – that iconic ballpark design, the apparently simple yet completely complicated (or vice-versa, depending on where you’re from) rule system, the fact that its not about being macho or aggressive, but hitting a ball and running, or catching a ball (with a really big glove). Simple really.

I was never a bat and ball kid. Cricket confused me (it still does) – while they may have light, bright, colourful playing kits now, I never understood growing up why they would play this sport in the middle of summer wearing thick woolly jumpers and long trousers. Rounders? Oh I hated rounders. I couldn’t throw the ball (pitch? bowl?) and was terrible at catching it, and if you missed an easy catch in the playground it was worse than, I don’t know, being Wayne Rooney at the World Cup. And you could get easily bored, with nothing to do but stand there and hope the ball doesn’t get hit in your direction. And then there was ‘softball’, which was just like rounders but with a ball that definitely wasn’t soft. I always wanted them to call it baseball so that we’d sound American and exotic, but I think you had to wear baseball caps if you wanted to call it baseball, and we couldn’t afford them at our school.

Now I live in America, and while I have always liked baseball, I’ve been a little slow in following it. My brother-in-law is a huge Giants fan, and my wife and son too, so naturally I am as well, and have been learning a lot more lately since the Giants won their division, then fought through the play-offs to win the National League, and are now two games into the World Series against the Texas Rangers – two games which they won quite emphatically (11-7 and 9-0 are veritable cricket scores even in baseball). We’ve been glued to the set (cynics can make a sentence out of the following words: “bandwagon, on, jumping, the”), it is pretty exciting. So I had to honour the Giants before they threw it all away (now who’s cynical? hey, that’s my long years as a Tottenham fan, plus a few years as a Giants fan) with a sketch of one of their players, Brian Wilson, “Fear the Beard”. He has this odd and fake-looking black beard, and Giants fans all wear their real-looking fake beards when he comes out to close (he is a ‘closer’, which means he’s a pitcher that pitches at the end of the match – look at me learning all new words!). I was going to draw Tim Lincecum (he looks like a young Severus Snape) but The Beard was too tempting (plus it reminds me a bit of Ricky Villa).

Go Giants! Fear the Beard! Get me some Garlic Fries!

here’s to the end of the world

October 28, 2010October 28, 20105 Comments

More brown paper bottle sketches. This is a nice beer I found recently, La Fin du Monde. It’s Canadian – Québecois in fact – and is a ‘triple’ beer. Triples are pretty potent, very tasty, but you gotta watch out. I used to drink Triple type beers when I lived in Belgium (Westmalle Triple to be precise) and ooh, you have fun nights with those. I really like the label on this bottle as well.

Santé!

on the buses

October 27, 2010October 27, 20106 Comments

Here in Davis we have a little bit of London. Unitrans has several old vintage London double-deckers which still ride around town, letting passengers hop off the rear deck into the middle of the road, keeping the ‘charming’ London place-names, exotic faraway locales such as Golders Green, Shepherds Bush and Finchley Road. UC Davis brought the buses over in the late 1960s to start a bus service, and these buses are not in fact Routemasters, but the models which came before. Presumably if Boris gets his new modern (ugly, unnecessary, expensive) Routemasters on the streets, Davis will be able to buy some of the bendy-buses.

There are four such buses left in Davis, dating from the late 40s and early 50s. One, the 1950 model, will retire at the end of the year. Maybe they’ll put it out to stud.

Altogether now… “I ‘ate you, Butler!”