it’s a bit early in the midnight hour for me

July 19, 2009July 20, 20097 Comments

And so back to the as yet unnamed series! We’re in the second half now, 16 of 30. This is me looking up at my shelf. The middle part of the words have been expressed before. Oh, I have always stayed up late. I seem unable to let go of the day, for some reason. It’s not simply, “I can’t sleep”, not that at all, it’s just I don’t get tired until late. I get a burst of energy, my mind starts thinking of all these things, I draw pictures, I don’t know. Whenever I have tried to go to bed earlier, I do lie in bed awake, unable to sleep, or I wake up at all sorts of funny hours. When I was younger though, I used to be able to stay up all night, no problem; nowadays if I do that I’m suffering for days. That’s age, I guess. I’m not descended from early-to-bedders, either.

Prisoner Cell Block H…now that was my favourite show. I watched it for years; it was the first run in the UK, but it was many years behind Australia. Bea Smith, the Freak, Vinegar Tits Vera Bennett, Frankie Doyle, all classic characters. Now of course I’m going to get google search engines sending fellow Prisoner fans this way. The search engines have been sending some funny things here lately. On WordPress they tell you which searches have led people to your blog. I wish I’d documented them all, some have been hilarious. “Pissing at bus-stop” for some bizarre reason sends people here; why are so many people googling that though? “Arsenal Sketchbook” sent someone here once. But today I noticed that someone googled “Peter Scully my tour guide was useless”, and came to my blog (was that you? if so, what’s that all about?). That made me crack up laughing. Is it someone telling me about their useless tour guide, or are they saying that I was their guide and was useless (which I would contest, since I’ve not been a tourguide myself for many years so nobody who took my tour would remember my name, and anyway, I was bloody good…). Either way, I won’t lose any sleep over it. If I ever go to bed, that is.

true it’s a dream, mixed with nostalgia

July 17, 2009July 18, 20092 Comments

After the sketchcrawlery of last Saturday, I rested my pens for a few days before taking up another version of the houses at Hampstead Ponds, which I’ve drawn several times now. It’s therapeutic, drawing all of those windows, from the comfort of my living room. The older versions drawn last year can be seen here and here. I’ve mentioned before, it would be my dream to live here, the Hampstead Village of Keats. We used to live not far from here, in Highgate, it’s just the perfect part of London. I do prefer Highgate, on the other side of the Heath, but Hampstead would be more convenient for getting to family in Burnt Oak and to the pubs in Camden (and I wouldn’t have to look down on Arsenal’s admittedly nice looking stadium). It’s damper there though, than here; in Davis this week we’ve had five days where it’s been about 100-105 F, and dry. The pubs are better here, but I prefer the beer in the Pacific US.

Anyway… if you are interested in seeing the steps of how this was done, the graphic (well, animated gif) below shows you how, though each step is but a second long.

hampstead-animation

On another note, I am thinking of starting an Etsy shop to make some originals and some prints available to buy; I might be listing this, so I’ll keep you posted. It’s 5″x7″, if you’re interested. In the meantime, if you should find yourself in Hampstead, pop over to the Heath and check this view out. It’s a lovely place.

sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 4, the end

July 16, 2009July 16, 2009Leave a comment

Tired after a long day’s sketching? Just go across the city to a cool little place, get a beer, and keep going. I went to Eddie Rickenbacker’s on 2nd St (I have drawn the outside of it before), a place chock full of vintage motorbikes, hanging from the walls and the ceiling. I sat and drew a 1951 Whizzer Sportsman, in pigma micron 05. It was nice to draw sat in a chair, at a table. They have a humungous cat at that place, called Mr. Higgins (perhaps we were related; there are Higgins on my mum’s side). When it was time to catch the Amtrak bus I left, tired legs, I could sketch no more. Still, it was a busy and very productive day. I think on days like this I learn a hell of a lot. I went back to Davis, had a cup of tea, and started scanning my drawings in…

You can see all of my drawings for this day on the Sketchcrawl site’s forum.

sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 3, the castro

July 15, 2009July 14, 20096 Comments

And so onwards and upwards with the 23rd Sketchcrawl; the Mission gradually became the Castro, and I chose to sit right in the middle of the sidewalk and draw some very colourful buildings on Sanchez.

I used a Pigma Micron 05 for this. I have been using them more and more, rather than the 01s I normally go with. I sat patiently and drew this, and passers-by were pleasant and didn’t disturb, although one young couple did drop some litter, right next to me, a plastic fruit carton. I don’t like people who drop litter (and no jokes about dirty sanchez, please). I was going to add the colour to this drawing there and then, but sitting on the floor was starting to get uncomfortable (I was rather hoping someone might offer me a chair), so I added the colour when I got home.

Below is the Castro theatre itself; I sketched (in copic 01) this while leaning on a newspaper stand at Harvey Milk Plaza. There was a Silent Film Festival going on at the time (shhh!). The Castro is the main gay area of the city; if you saw the recent biopic Milk, about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the US, you would recognize the sights, including his old shop on Castro Street, while walking round. Up above the streets and houses, rainbows were flying high.

This was almost the last drawing of the day…but there is still one more to come…

sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 2, the mission

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009Leave a comment

After sketching City Hall, I BARTed it down to the Mission District. I love the Mission. It is actually illegal not to have a big burrito when you come here so I had one (it was ok, I’ve had better), and sketched this from the bus stop, at the corner of Valencia and 16th. The lack of sketching stool meant being creative with my seating choices, so the bus-stop was perfect. I always have to figure, when out urban sketching, that the odd street mental might come and start talking to me. As it happened, the random guy who started chatting to me this time (despite my headphones being clearly on) was actually very interesting, and an artist himself, and we had a chat about how drawing was really just a series of lines and choices. He also told me that Paul McCartney owned the rights to the song Happy Birthday to You. I didn’t know that. He probably made it up. I told him that when McCartney plays Beatles songs on tour he changes the lyrics of “When I’m Sixty-Four” to “When I Was Sixty-Four”. Of course, I made that up, but it could be true.

I strolled up 16th looking for another comfy spot to draw, and chose a really uncomfy spot on a narrow corner with negligible shade, in order to draw the Mission Dolores. Well, dolores means pain, and I suffer for my art.

I love drawing those powerlines, it’s one of the best reasons to sketch in the Mission. I don’t know if the One Way sign was put up by the Missionaries but it could be so (I will tell people it was, anyhow). Might make more sense outside a cemetary. Anyway, it was sunny, but windy, and so I held up the sketchbook for the obligatory handheld shot, and moved on towards the Castro. That’s the thing about Sketchcrawl, you just gotta keep moving. Well, I do.

More to come…

sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 1, city hall

July 13, 2009July 13, 20092 Comments

Last Saturday was the day of the 23rd Worldwide Sketchcrawl, so I took the early train down to San Francisco. The sc23, city hall main group was meeting up at the Presidio, but I didn’t fancy going all the way up there; I was yearning for some ‘urban’ to sketch. I started off visiting the excellent Paul Madonna exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library, the five year retrospective of his All Over Coffee strip, which I’ve followed for almost two years now (I came across it while on the Sketchcrawl in Berkeley, and was drawn to because it was a similar style to what I was trying to achieve; it inspired me to do more monochrome stuff). I was surprised, though I don’t know why, at how large the originals were, but that’s only because I tend to draw everything so damn small. Suitably inspired to get out and draw, I sat outside the library and sketched the San Francisco City Hall. The Tenderloin army shuffled by in groups of one, like characters from a Miyazaki film, lost in their own little odour-filled universes. Somewhere across the square was a rabble led by a very vocal Mexican man screaming, literally screaming, into a microphone, to the point where his voice started to fail him, and the microphone started to break. It clearly didn’t stay broken though because he launched into song, backed by a Latin American dance music band, playing a repetitive one-verse, I don’t know, anthem I suppose, which went on and on and on for about six months. My thoughts weren’t with the guy singing, but with the band members, particularly the guitarists. Their wrists must have been super tired. I was wondering whether they took shifts, if perhaps another person came and took over halfway through the song, to give them a break. For all I knew it was a tape loop. When I was done (and I was really pleased with the resulting sketch, by the way), I hopped onto the BART and went down to the Mission. I fancied a burrito.

Above: sketches from the Amtrak train on the way down. It is now obligatory for me to do these sketches whenever I go down to the Bay Area.

More sketchcrawled sketches to come!!!

boring conversation anyway

July 10, 2009July 11, 20093 Comments

Do people even use phoneboxes any more? I barely even use my cellphone. I have a pay-as-you-go plan, which is not like the one I have on my still-active English phone (which still has the plan set up years ago on one-2-one, even has that logo on the screen!). No the one I have here means that you spend $25 to top it up fro three months. If you don’t add more money by the end of the three months, not only can you not use the phone but you lose whatever money you have left (and since I never use it, that’s usually most of it). If you renenw, it doesn’t just add three months onto whenever your three months is up, it just goes three months from whenever you topped up, so essentially you lose days, unless you renew right on the last day. Confused? I am. I have never liked mobile phones here. It’s just incredible to me that you get charged for receiving a call. That’s why I never give people my number, because I’ll never pick up if I don’t recognise it (for a while I was getting a lot of marketing calls, especially around the time of the election).

Speaking of cold calls, I hate those ones that have that pre-recorded message, “this is your final notification to renew your car insurance”, or some such, when yesterday and the day before and the day before that were the final norifications, and tomorrow too, all from companies I’ve never done business with. I hate the robots. At least with real people calling I can antagonize them a bit (sometimes I talk reeeeallllyyy reeeeeaaaallllyyyyy slowly), but even then my heart’s not in it, and I feel sorry for them. After all, everyone’s gotta work. I had to do it, once, for about a week and a half, many many years ago. It was not fun, and the guy running the show (I think he was called ‘Boyd’ or something) fancied himself as a bit of a hardnose, so I left to get a job as a male dinner-lady at a posh school. I remember one time, I made the marketing call, and ended up chatting to an old guy on the phone for about half an hour about his work (writing travel brochures), literature, travel, I forget now. Either way I didn’t sell him whatever it was they were selling. It cheered me up though. I sometimes wonder if those cold callers wouldn’t also fancy a nice long chinwag, a chat about the footy, or the state of modern television, just to ease the drudgery of their work. But if they do, I wish they’d stop calling me right in the middle of Jeopardy.

call the engines, call the engines

July 9, 2009July 9, 2009Leave a comment

My wife got me a new small Moleskine diary, and it’s awesome; it’s 18 month so started in July, and fits right in my pocket. I christened it with a drawing of my son’s fire truck, given to him at the weekend by his great-grandma. I might draw in this fairly often, something small to commemorate or represent each week. Maybe.

yard birds

July 8, 2009July 8, 20092 Comments

More from Medford, Oregon. Amid a large reunion of family, on a very hot Independence Day (America is independent, you know, not part of a chain). I sat outside and listened to the sound of the kids playing, and drew under the shade of a big tree and two cars. A nice way to spend an early afternoon. There are lots of interesting things to draw at my wife’s grandma’s house, from the things in the front yard (my son just loved that wooden duck! I liked the little owl), to the birdhouse/doll’s house (um, I forgot to ask which!) sketched below. I did that in the evening while babysitting.

It was a fun weekend. Lots of nice people. Oregon is cool, different from California; you can’t pump your own gas there, for example, and there’s no sales tax. I was also away from the internet, and the news, for several days. Apart from the events at Wimbledon (poor Murray! and then poor Roddick!), I had no idea about the outside world, and that was nice. I totally missed that Palin woman’s resignation (she seems to think there’s no big deal, resigning as governor of a state midway through the first term, ah people do it all the time – um, no they don’t, not if they wish to remain credible) (hang on, did I say ‘remain’ credible? Palin?). I also missed Michael Owen’s apparent transfer to Manchester United, which could turn out to be the deal of the summer. (Or it could of course turn out that the boy Owen really has lost it, as his Newcastle form suggested, and that Sir Alex will just be putting lipstick on a pig… er…)

oregon trail

July 7, 2009July 7, 2009Leave a comment

We spent the long Independence Day weekend in Medford, Oregon, attending a large family reunion. I’ve been once before – it’s a long old journey through the northern reaches of California, up the valley and through the mountains, and Medford really does feel a world away from Davis. The heat came with us though, regularly hitting the low 100s. Right on the rural edge of town, horses, chickens, rabbits, and the sound of roosters crowing. I perched in the shade outside my wife’s grandma’s house, and drew my wife’s uncle’s Corvette, which had travelled even further than we had (in considerably more style), but stopped while adding the colours, just as a truckload of cousins-in-law pulled up. I think the ‘missing’ colours actually give the sketch a bit more strength; it is so easy to overdo it.

I did manage a drawing on the drive up too. I sat in the backseat for a little while to feed and generally entertain my 17-month old son, but he fell asleep, so I attempted some in-car sketching, which is pretty hard. You can just about see the mountainous forests whizzing by there.