they think it’s all over

6 Comments

Sunday sees the end of the 2008-09 English Premier League Season. Manchester United have already snatched a third successive title, so the real focus is at the table’s foot, where Newcastle, Hull and Sunderland are fighting for survival, with the other North-eastern club Middlesbrough already all but down. Mystic Pete assures me that Hull, who are playing Man U, will go down (as you know, I am Mystic Pete’s representative on Earth, and he is seldom wrong, well, sometimes, well, all the time), but in many ways I’d prefer Newcastle to drop. Not that I have anything against them, if anything I feel great pity for Newcastle: not many big teams make a bigger balls-up of things and go through managers than my beloved Spurs, but Newcastle really teach us a lesson. It’s as if the people running the club want them to go down. It reminds me of the Eurosong organizers in that episode of Father Ted, who let Ted and Dougal’s “My Lovely Horse” win. My Lovely Horse, running around in the field… (um, don’t tell Michael Owen)

As for Spurs, well we got out of that battle a while ago, and how! Now we’re a win away from getting into the Europa Cup (that’s the UEFA Cup; as Alan Partridge would say, “they’ve rebranded it you fool!”) which we purposely got knocked out of this season, to give us a better chance of getting back into it next year. Speaking of Europe, Manchester United face Barcelona in the Champion’s League final on Wednesday in what should be a classic. A phrase which guarantees it will be a 120 minute 0-0 affair ending in tired overpaid stars tapping in penalties. Perhaps we’ll be surprised.

The season finale I’m following most closely however is that in France. When we lived in Aix, in 2002, Olympique Lyonnaise won the title for the first time ever, and we were all pleased. They have won it every year since, totally dominating. This year, however, they’ve slipped up and allowed Bordeaux and Marseille to slug it out. As a Marseille fan I’m delighted, (though Pierre Mystique tells me that les Girondins will break OM hearts), but I just hope this ushers in a new era of competitiveness in French Football.

This time of year though is the time when new football shirts come out to play, and debates rage on football shirt websites (such as football shirt culture, or football-shirts.co.uk) about the lame unimaginativeness of Nike’s templates or the dread felt by fans of teams who have Puma that their new kit will also be in their new cheap wierd chevron style (that’s my concern for the upcoming Tottenham kit anyhow; Puma make nice trainers, but atrocious football kits). Kit companies have taken to releasing ‘leaked images’ of fake kits, to throw off the counterfeiters; Umbro did so with the new England kit. And of course, South American and lower-league English teams are still using female models to launch their new shirts (many of whom wear them much more elegantly than the average beer-and-pie-guzzling footy fan would), but this year’s prize for gratuitous use of female model goes to Northern Ireland’s Linfield. Their new Umbro away kit apparently features some sort of thong. That makes a change; most of the new kits this year are just pants.

get me to the church on time

2 Comments

davis community church

I remember drawing this building, Davis Community Church, three years ago, and thinking, I don’t like this drawing much. Its the colours. I finally got round to drawing it again, and while i prefer this I still don’t like the colours much. So I’ve decided it’s not me, it’s the building, it’s the wrong colour. I might write to them and ask them to paint it something else, pink or white or something. I edited out the homeless person who was ambling about the entrance with a trolley, mainly because she wouldn’t stand still but kept wandering off yelling something like ‘get out of my head’. I also edited out the big SUVs parked outside. While I was drawing another one pulled right up and parked in front of me, and out stepped JR Ewing, or his double.  I’m surprised I saw any of the church. I actually made most of it up.

but it’s still mightier than the sword

7 Comments

1, hold pen funny

I started a new series. It’s like the Save the World project, even in the same type of book, but semi-autobiographical. That doesn’t mean part-fiction, it means it’s not going to be the whole story, just some, y’know, miscellaneous details. Semi-attached. Remember those ’25 things about me’ memes that were flying about bloggiverse and facebookville a couple of months ago? Gave me an idea for a new sketchbook-long series. It might be entirely in cobalt copic, until I change my mind after three drawings and use olive green. Expect to see more little things from around the flat. I hope I didn’t draw them all last time round…

Anyway, yes, I hold my pen funny.

if you can’t take the heat

2 Comments

The weather over the weekend was a whopping 104 degrees. Stay inside sort of weather. People from Burnt Oak aren’t cut out for hundred degree heat. G and 2nd

Davisites are used to it though. Californians in general love the sunshine and the heat (I have to laugh when my wife complains that it is cold when it is 65 degrees at 8am), though Central Valley heat is not so loveable, and the heat has come early this year. So I was pleased today that the weather plummeted to a brisk 90 degrees. I braved the chilly weather and poked about downtown during my lunch hour, huddling up for long enough to draw the corner of G and 2nd Streets, in purple micron and wine copic muliliner, before cycling back.

miscellaneous details

3 Comments

Whew! So I finished (or, more accurately, I stopped) and it is perfectly square. Forget all the ‘de-clutter your home’  books, I’m campaigning for the re-clutter movement.

miscellaneous details

I’m presenting it in this direction though really you should lay your screen flat on the desk and walk around it. Or up on the ceiling and walk beneath it. Mind nothing falls off, there are some small sharp things in there. I hope you like it. It was laborious this one, and drawn at all eccentric and nonlinear times. My favourite bit is the shoe, my baby son’s shoe. I’ve entered it for a cover design competition; it probably won’t win but it’d be nice if it does.

cross over the river, where they feel safe and sound

Leave a comment

in the arboretumA sketch by Putah Creek, in the UC Davis Arboretum. I braved the heat and the allergy-inducing winds to sit and sketch this. Putah Creek is a great place to come in Summer if you want to catch West Nile Virus, from all the mosquitoes that hang out here. Speaking of hanging out, the bridges such as this one are home (or sign the sign says) to many bats, (who eat the mosquitoes). If you fancy catching rabies, I read somewhere it’s endemic in local bats. And then there’s the black widows. Don’t get me started.

Dangerous place, is Davis.  And it’s going to hit a hundred degrees this weekend.

i could keep this up all night

Leave a comment

miscellaneous detail 3

miscellaneous detail 4In fact I am. A state of non-sleep (that’ll be ‘awake’) means I am up addingmore miscellaneous details. The act of drawing everything in my apartment (saving the world, it was called last year) brings me closer to another fine mess. Nearly done. You can make a jigsaw out of it. Maybe that’s what I’ll do.

back to front, left to right

5 Comments

miscellaneous detail 1I am drawing lots of small objects at the moment, miscellaneous extraneous details if you will, onto a larger peice of paper than I normally work on. This, therefore, takes longer. I was hoping to have it finished this coming week (I may be entering it for something if I like it) but who knows?

Anyway here a couple of details.I am drawing it so that when it is finished, it will be square, and not obvious which way it should be hung. I always think that when I see some abstract piece in a modern art gallery. Perhaps the artist had one way of hanging it in mind (presumably the way he or she painted it) but when he or she gave it to a gallery they hung it sideways, or upside down (or backwards even, you never know). And then that way stuck, and the artist never let on, because he thought it was funny. And then some rich wannabe buff buys it and hangs it in his mansion, and selected art-savvy hangers-on sycophants come by and smirk because he doesn’t realise he’s hanging it sideways, and they laugh at thim while he’s in the toilet, and then the artist walks in and says it’s not sideways, it’s upside down, and they don’t know whether to smirk or cry, but nobody tells the buff in the bog. It has probably never happened, but it would be funny (in a bad predictable sitcom kind of way).

Anyway… here’s how I am doing. I love my noodles.

miscellaneous detail 2

wouldn’t it be nice

4 Comments

balboa park, san diego museum of man

After all the modern US corporate architecture in La Jolla’s conference district it was actually a bit of a surprise to come face to face with magnificent decorated buildings from the mid 1600s no less right in the heart of San Diego. Well, it is pretty much where California began (and still begins). We didn’t spend very long at Balboa Park, but long enough to see what an increcible place it is – I could spend all day there, drawing, it’s a sketcher’s dream. I stopped outside the Museum of Man, with its ornate down and ridiculously Churrigueresque entrance and tower, aka the California Tower. To coin a phrase, phebleedingnominal. However, san diego balboa parkit turns out that this building isn’t as old as the other one I saw (which actually was from the 1600s according to its sign), but this building was finished in the early 20th century for some world fair. Still, well worth a sketch. Two in fact; I did the one above in copic 01, while the thumb on the right was done in brown micron.

It’s funny, you know. You think of Southern California and all those people who get facelifts and plastic surgery and so on to look younger; the buildings on the other hand want to look older. Maybe that’s what the Beach Boys were singing about.

I didn’t get much other drawing done in San Diego. We did drive through the cool-looking Gaslamp District and visited the Seaport Village, which was nice; some other time perhaps. San Diego looks well worth another visit. Next time, when our boy’s older, we’ll go to the zoo.