chipotle shoulder

June 23, 20092 Comments

Lunchtime downtown, sketched out in the heat (almost hit a century today). Had a burrito at Chipotle. That’s not my bike, by the way.

Have you noticed how everything these days is ‘chipotle’? Food marketers can’t get enough of it. I even saw some chocolate dessert thing somewhere that had chipotle in the title recently, presumably to entice ye who cannot get enough chipotle. I’m surprised automakers haven’t started using it to shift cars in these troubled times. “The new Chevrolet Chipotle, more fuel efficient than a Fajita and spicier than a Ford.”

bag it up

June 22, 2009Leave a comment

I have this bag, from Eddie Bauer, which I carry everywhere. It’s the perfect size for what I use it for, which is to carry my sketchbook and pencil case and anything else that might come in handy, with lots of extra little pockets and compartments, without being so big that I’m tempted to fill it up. It’s my perfect shoulder bag (I went through a few to get there).

And today at lunchtime I had nothing I wanted to draw, so I just drew the bag. Ive drawn it before. I also wanted to use my blue/black micron 05.

a change it had to come

June 19, 2009Leave a comment

Hundred degree weather came back to Davis this week, after a relatively cool period for California – on the KCRA3 Weather they said it had been a ‘summerless June’. Apart from a few clouds and some rain in the mountains, it has been generally sunny and in the warm 80s. So, obviously gloves and scarf weather. You gotta love Californians.

I’ve drawn this view – the Bike Barn and South Silo, as seen from Bainer Hall – several times before. I like the view, it is fun to draw and you always see it anew each time. The only things that change are the leaves on the trees and the work on the green in the foreground. Funny enough, that even changed while I was drawing. I had to spread it out over a couple of lunchtimes, and on the second lunchtime that fence had gone, and someone was mowing the lawn (after I’d drawn all that spongy long grass). Oh well! It is the front of the Hog Barn – sorry, it’s not called that any more, it’s the Hubert Heitman something or other, as they made clear at a campus design council meeting I went to there (coincidentally, fellow Davis sketcher/blogger Pica was at the same meeting, and caught me without sketchbook). Anyway it has recently been renovated and opened (and it smells so new inside) so they’re adding the finishing touches. The world sits still for no sketcher.

Here are some other versions of this scene.

we mean it, man

June 18, 2009June 25, 20093 Comments

#11 in the series. I have a box full of old cassettes, ones I’ve owned my whole life. Gonads, that was my band at school; I didn’t sing, but I played the guitar (well, I strummed it and my fingers made chord shapes every so often). The singer, Hooker, was very good. One year he sang in front of the whole school in only his y-fronts, and a beret, if memory serves. I also wrote the songs. Three, four chords. Sometimes we’d just improvise. Once we improvised an entire gospel piece, which still makes me laugh to this day. The song about Jacques Delors was very catchy, and was full of absurdist lyrics parodying the absurd Europhobic headlines of the day, all about banning crisp flavours and killing off willo-the-wisp. We had some of those teenage songs about girls, too, like the ‘Great Unnamed Love Song’, and we covered (rather, absolutely slaughtered beyond recognition) stuff from Sex Pistols to Bryan Adams to Wonderstuff. We were obsessed with ‘Enter the Dragon’. And we had a song about the people who sell the Evening Standard down in London, based pretty much on an encounter we had near Bank station with one particularly incomprehensible vendor. The things that inspire you when you’re fifteen.

Oh we sounded absolutely dreadful, but it was just great fun. Something I’m proud of. If you like I will tell you where you can hear some of it.

wrapped up in books

June 17, 2009Leave a comment

Cycled to the Davis library on sunday, took back those books I didn’t read. I then got books out I’ve already read, well this one anyhow. I sketched the biography section in brown pen. I’ve always been a library-dweller, since I was a kid. I used to bury my nose in books about language, scouring libraries across the borough (preferably for those that said “warning: contains obscure language”). Sometimes I would read fiction, sometimes – quite often – I would read travel books. And I used to spend a lot of time in the music library, taking out records, any scratches marked clearly on the vinyl by the librarian with that yellow crayon. I would get back on the bus with a can of Lilt and a Mars bar, and read up on philology, all the way home.

the usual suspects

June 15, 20094 Comments

Each pen was drawn by itself. These are some of the contents of my pencil case.

your tasty beverage

June 15, 2009June 14, 2009Leave a comment

Getting quiet on campus. I had Taco Bell for lunch on Friday, at the Silo, and drew the cup and the scene beyond it. The fountain soda cup (not the Big Gulp, mind) should be the on the seal of the United States, forget the eagle. this is pretty much the national symbol. Back in Europe the cups are all so small. Small means small. Here, ‘regular’ can mean ‘small’ in one place (roughly twice the size of European small), but ‘medium’ in another. ‘Medium’ on the other hand doesn’t mean ‘medium’ but ‘actually that’s quite big’, in most places. I know one thing, enough of these and ‘medium’ and ‘small’ soon cease to be in your vocabulary.

This is UC Davis, drawn again in purple micron 01.

pete folds none

June 14, 2009June 25, 20099 Comments

#10 of 30. Folding clothes is really really difficult. Look, I’m not setting out to write the message that ‘anything is possible if you put your mind to it’, I’m sure that’s true and I can vouch for it, in some areas. Don’t tell me that practise makes perfect. But folding clothes is flipping near impossible to get right, at least for me. It’s like magic, I mean I am always constantly amazed at it, the spectacle never wears off, to the point where I don’t want to know how they do it. I don’t go to the theatre, I just go down to the Gap and watch them fold t-shirts.

I don’t really. But you know what I mean. Maybe.

i’ll meet you on a bus at dawn

June 13, 2009June 25, 2009Leave a comment

I’ve talked before about my summers as a tour-guide above the streets of London. It was a very physical job. And highly enjoyable. Like sketching, you learn to look. On each tour I’d notice something new, a face in the masonry, a pub with an interesting past, an actual Han Solo in carbonite movie prop in a video store window (it’s in Gloucester Road), and take note, and use it to illustrate my next tour. Useful if stuck in traffic (a frequent occurence) to know lots of little facts. I can probably still remember most of them. You don’t want to know them.

Still, there would occasionally be that one person who knew it all, and would interrupt with the one nugget you left out while whipping down Fleet Street, or correct you at every turn if you weren’t quoting sources like footnotes at every red light. One person in particular (a British man with a very embarrassed looking daughter) did this incessantly on one tour, pissing off several other people, some of whom even kindly offered to throw him into the Thames. I generally ignored him, but as we passed into Parliament Square, I announced (as per our training) that the English Parliament, which dates back to about 1250 (“or ten to one”, which always got a giggle), is known as the “Mother of Parliaments”. Well, it is. The interruptive guy frowned and raised an eyebrow. “The Mother of Parliaments? What about the Icelandic Althing?”

“No, that’s the Father of Parliaments,” I shot back. “But you always know who your mother is.”

This is number 9 in a series of 30.

the sweetest thing

June 13, 2009June 12, 2009Leave a comment

The last one from Monterey. I sketched this fabulous building from the 1880s, the Thomas Kinkade National Archive, in the Harry A. Greene Mansion. Or Willy Wonka’s Summer House, as I prefer to call it.

I sat across the road on Sunday morning sketching this venerable candy stick, wondering if there might be an old witch stuck in an oven inside. Why would someone put a giant toffee apple on their roof? Perhaps it attracts the flies and mosquitoes, they stick to it, nobody gets bitten, they’re laughing. Makes sense, really. I might try it. Better than spraying insecticide everywhere to prevent West Nile. Stick a load of half-sucked sticks of rock or candy canes out in your garden. Maybe that’s where the Christmas tradition came from, you don’t know.

Here’s the obligatory action shot.