The massive rainstorms this week have confined me to the inside world. I feel like a hermit. But you’re from London, they protest, you must be used to the rain. Yeah, it got me just as wet there too. So anyway, I’m still using bits of cut up enelopes to make my drawing look a little different. I had a few minutes over lunch to draw out of rain-soaked window, in poor visibility, in brown micron on an envelope that came from London, funny enough.
When massive storms are swirling outside, you need to stay in, and draw your home. This corner of the apartment is where we keep the music. Why is it that no matter how many CDs I have I only ever listen to the same few ones? I used to listen to a lot more music than I do now, years ago, or at least it feels like that. Maybe it’s because I don’t spend my weekends jumping about to the crackle of records as I did when I was a teenager, or fall asleep to the repeats of a CD, or commute for an hour plus to the hiss of a tape deck, as I did for too many years in London. I have an mp3 player now, everything on random shuffle. My two-year-old likes music. When we get up together on early weekend mornings we put on some top tunes and rock out with air guitar to our breakfast. He likes ‘Formed a Band’. And ‘Yellow Submarine’. He’s a budding little artist too – that’s one of his finger-paintings on the wall there.
When I was a teenager, it was all about the records, Never Mind The Bollocks, full blast. Not really any feeling quite like it. It’s what teenagers do. If I listen to it now, I swear I can still hear my mum or dad shouting my name up the stairs (not usually to turn it down, funny enough, more often just to come down and make a cup of tea). I guess I have all that to look forward to.
Last time I drew this bar I mis-spelled the name as Froggies, so I felt I had to draw in there again to rectify my error. It’s actually ‘Froggy’s’. This was the corner of the bar that you couldn’t see in that drawing too.
People were gathered for the American football, the play-offs so I understand. There was ice-hockey going on as well. This is how they spend their Saturdays, and I can certainly understand. I popped into the Soccer shirt shop down the road to watch some Premier League as well; Chelsea were thrashing Sunderland (my own Spurs manged a 0-0 with Hull). This is what Saturday’s are all about, isn’t it? For us men. For so many years, my Saturday’s were about getting what I needed to do done by about 3pm so I could listen to the footy on the radio and watch the scores come in at 4:45 on the BBC videprinter (is that what it was called?). And then late in the evening, Match of the Day, my favourite show. These days, I get my football results as I wake up, via live internet updates on the BBC (and their updater is far more sarky than the man who reads the results at final score). So nowadays my Saturday begins with the footy, and I don’t really care about the other sports (nor the MLS, which is frankly rubbish). So, sometimes, I go sketching instead.
If you didn’t know, Davis is a cycling capital. There are bikes everywhere, and I mean everywhere – especially just before and after classes on the UC Davis campus. they come from left and right and behind and probably from above and below too. They’ll cut you up, whizz through stop lights, pay no attention to other cyclists turning, and occasionally mash each other up around the roundabouts (which can be entertaining). Just this morning a guy cycling behind me flew off his bike at speed while turning a puddle-riddled corner. I noticed he had headphones in both ears (oooh, that’s against the law). You see a lot of people texting while cycling too. WTF? There is a bike cop on campus who gives cyclists the odd telling-off for riding in no-cycling zones, and occasionally cops will stop cyclists who actually do follow the rules of the road, and give them a reward for their good behaviour. It’s true, I read it in the paper.
Sometimes, with all these bikes, there is just nowhere to park. The owner of this red bike just chained their road-bike to a lamp-post. That was nice of them. It gave me something to draw at lunchtime.
#13 in the ever-expanding series. These are the Osh-Kosh shoes, hand-me-downs from a friend’s older child, which are in fact my son’s first lace-ups (not that he can tie his laces or anything yet, of course, though I wouldn’t put it past him).
Copic 0.1 in a Moleskine cahier.
My envelope-filled recycling bin overfloweth; I know how Jimmy Saville must feel now. Well not quite. Anyway the drawing continues, this manila envelope piece, cut out and glued into the moleskine, had three bells on it (pull the other one), the so-called US ‘forever stamps’ (in England they’re all called that, ‘cos it takes forever for your letters to get there). This is of course the Silo at UC Davis, today at lunchtime. It is still gloomy and damp here in California.
I wanted to draw on some different surfaces, try out some new things. I get a lot of mail from all over the world in my job, mostly from China, and my recycling bin is chock full of interesting looking envelopes waiting to be drawn on. So I cut one up, pasted it into my moleskine and drew the view from the stairwell today, the UCD water tower on a foggy January lunchtime. I don’t remember which university this envelope came from, nor do I read Chinese, but I thought the effect of the red writing looked really cool on the brown paper. Oh, and yes I know it is upside down.
It can get pretty foggy in Davis. After long months of summer, then the odd massive rainstorm, and some cold bright winter days, fog is not exactly the most frequent of visitors, but when it comes it comes. It collects on my top as I cycle down the bike path. It soaks the ground like a rainshower. It hangs around all day, sometimes vanishing in the aftenoon like it never existed, other times – like today – lingering like an army of ghosts. Ok, maybe that’s overdoing it. But it was cold today – I know, it’s freezing brass monkey weather in Britain right now, we can’t complain – and I didn’t much fancy drawing. But I decided to go outside and sketch a tree, my first outside sketch in what feels like ages (the last one was in fact this one, just over a month ago in Burnt Oak), and I’m glad I did, I got some fresh air. Or fresh fog, at least.
It’s January 6th, so time to take down the tree, and put away the decorations! This is our little tree we got for our first Xmas in America, and we still have it. The ornaments, mostly my wife’s, go back years; some are older than I am, I think. The corner will look so bare without the tree, even though only half the lights were working on it (I never got around to changing them!). Oh well, it really is a new year now.
I had to draw this shoe again from a different angle. This is the twelfth entry in the book called ‘Luke’s Shoes’, in which I draw all of my son’s shoes (in case you didn’t know already).
This is my first drawing of 2010! My art goal for this year – draw more people, especially faces, and from life too. Also draw even more shoes. I do have New Year’s Resolutions (such as 600 dpi) but I’m not telling you what they are.
petescully 