a right couple of spanners

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Illustration Friday this week: “repair”. Decided in the end not to do a watercolour wash, but to use another colour micron pen, and then a warm grey faber-castell brush pen, and leave it at that. Something different for me. Yeah the lines are kinda goin’ places, but it’s an election year, so.

repairs

This economic meltdown is causing absolute chaos, and shows that just allowing the free market to do what it will is clearly not good enough. Tell you what though, a couple of months ago the pound was worth $2.05, today it was $1.57, pretty good for me, now I can actually afford to buy things in the UK and pay some of my student loans.

Tottenham Hotspur, oh bloody hell, can this be fixed? Bottom, winless, hopeless, useless; we were not broken under Jol, but we fixed it, now we’re broken, and this will take bloody Joe the Plumber or someone to fix.

Speaking of whom, how has Joe the Plumber become the main star of the election? Incredible the way rabid media air-fillers filled air with investigating this guy who just happened to ask Obama a question, and was then used shamelessly by McCain and Palin (who loves people called Joe, god knows who Joe Six-pack is supposed to be, I can’t work out if it’s someone who works out or someone who drinks too much beer). And there are the media scrutinising this guy like he’s the one running for office, camping outside his house, interviewing him (he’s better at it than Palin); and it’s so funny, he won’t tell them who he’s voting for, which is great (but it’s kinda obvious). Hey did I just use ‘kinda’ twice? Been listening to too many crappy political speeches. Joe the Plumber; if he’d been called Zainab the Plumber, would he have been used by the Republicans? (Do they realise Joe the Plumber’s middle name is ‘Saddam’?) Well, they couldn’t use Bob the Builder (his catchphrase sounds a bit too much like an Obama slogan: “can he fix it? yes he can!”), and too many in the GOP base had a problem accepting Postman Pat because he was palling around with a cat who can’t decide if he’s black or white, and as for Fireman Sam, the ‘hero next door’, well he’s not even married; he could be gay! Who can the Republican ticket use next in this election? Chorlton from Chorlton and the Wheelies? Mr Spoon from Button Moon? Bagpuss? Time’s running out guys.

urban sketchers of the world unite

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I love cities, I love drawing in cities, and so this is right up my street, and yours too. A new website will be officially launching on November 1: urbansketchers.com. Founded by Seattle-based illustrator Gabi Campanario, it will feature the drawings of a number of excellent sketchblogging artists from cities on four (so far) continents. I am pleased to announce that I am the correspondent for Davis, and I’m really looking forward to contributing to this exciting project. The other artists involved have some incredible work, some of which I’m familiar with, and many whose work is new to me (and it is very inspiring stuff!). I love that there are so many different ways of interpreting our cities, so I’m looking forward to learning a few new styles. Check it out, bookmark it, tell your friends, get a sketchbook, go outside, draw stuff. Now form a band.

(Now, of course, I have to try to make Davis look ‘urban’…)

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Tomorrow, I’ll be off to San Francisco for some very urban sketching down in the Mission, for the 20th Worldwide Sketch Crawl. My sketching stool is being stitched together, I’m testing out a new paintbox, and leaving room inside me for burritos. The Sketchcrawl is happening all over the world, so check out the forum to see if any other sketchers are getting out and about in your city. And yes, this time there’s one happening in London too (on the South Bank from Borough, the same route Simon and I did last year for the Sketchcrawl).

let it B street

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bakers square

After getting my new glasses earlier this week, I decided to spend ten minutes doing a very quick drawing. I kinda lost the ‘very-quick-drawing’ thing for a bit there, in favour of the ‘very-detailed-never-time-to-finish’ style of sketching, so it was nice to give myself ten minutes to do something quick. First thing I see. With a failing micron .03 pen too. This is the corner of B and 2nd (and no, there is no apostrophe in that bakers square sign). And it actually took eight minutes.

überlingen am bodensee

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Überlingen am Bodensee
Überlingen am Bodensee. I came here in 1996 to stay for a year, but liked it so much I stayed for nearly a month. That was a funny episode in my life. Whatever possessed me to up sticks and suddenly move to Germany? Where I knew nobody, with practically no money nor idea of what I was doing, going off to save the world I think it was. I’d always wanted to live in Germany. I had gone to work with mentally disabled children at the local Heimsonderschule, several miles out of town (on my one day off a week I’d hike or hitch into town, look around the record shop and the bookstore – I love German bookstores – then trudge back again). For one reason or other I decided it was the wrong move, though, and trudged back to England.

I no longer recall that much about Überlingen; I did revisit briefly in 1998 while on my five-week tour of Europe, and took the photo from which I drew this picture, but didn’t stay long. It also made headlines after two passenger planes collided ouside the town, a few years ago. I have been to Bodensee (or Lake Constance, on the Swiss/Austrian/German border) several times, first of all when I was 15, on a school work experience trip to Vorarlberg. “Schnupperlehre”, I think the experience was called.

I do remember hitching into town, though. The walk was pleasant enough, going past pear orchards and rolling sunflower meadows, but long; a lift would be nice. I often hitchhiked while strawberry picking in Denmark – pretty much everybody I knew there did, not just into town or back to the farm, but often across Europe. I was told one trick of hitchhiking, to stand nearby to where a car has broken down. They may just be waiting for the AA to show up, but you’re more likely to get offered a lift by some kind passing audi. When it’s raining, you’re happy for such advice, even if you feel a little guilty about it. But local people would always offer to give you a ride:  the first evening I arrived in Überlingen, I was checking out the map at the station as the sky grew ever darker, when a family asked if I needed a lift to wherever I needed to go. Oh, no that’s ok, danke, ich gehe zu Fuss. “Nein, nein, es ist zu weit!” they insisted, laughing hearty German laughs (after discovering how far it was and how dark the countryside was at night, I bashfully agreed). They even invited me to dinner at their house the following week (I regret not going). It seems so long ago. The idea of hitchhiking anywhere now seems so mental to me, perhaps it’s living in America where, and I thank you media, hitchhiking equals certain death possibly involving machetes and being buried in the desert.

le petit

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cheeky boy
Over eight and a half months old, baby luke is becoming little boy luke, and is getting himself around and into all sorts of mischief: what i didn’t draw here were his surroundings, a pile of dvds he just pulled off the shelf. Life is about to become a whole load of fun. He already loves to tear magazines apart. My sketchbooks will be hidden far far away.

This was drawn in baby’s journal. I can’t quite get his face right yet though. Eyes are wrong, face too round, hair too dark. Then again each time I attempt a drawing, he changes a bit more. They really do grow so quickly at this age, just like everybody says; I can barely keep up.

smelled the spring on the smoky wind

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la cuve à bière

Between 1999 and 2000 I lived and worked in Charleroi, Belgium, as my Year Abroad while studying French. Who could love Charleroi? The sprawling decayed post-industrial mess at the heart of the slag-dumped Pays Noir, derided as a bed of crime and shady politics, and the place where a lot of England fans threw a lot of chairs and got hit in the face with big water-cannons for their efforts. Well, grimy as it is, I do love Charleroi. The people are warm and welcoming, and down-to-earth, and beneath the soot and neon there is some gorgeous art-nouveau archtitecture to be found. It’s the home of some of Belgium’s most beloved BD (comic book) stars, such as Spirou and Lucky Luke. Yes there are rats the size of small cows, but so what? (I tripped over a massive rat here once, actually tripped over it – it ignored me and just shuffled along, watched by a prudent cat).

And the beer is amazing. This is la cuve à bière, a little pub I used to visit several times during the week, largely because they had a TV that would show match of the day on BBC1. I’d sit and write or draw, taste new beers, eat cheese. Sometimes, Tel would come over from England and drink Kwak. I remember that on cold sleety nights I would walk through the doors, my glasses would steam up instantly, but by the time I’d wiped them clean and gotten to the bar, my beer would already be there waiting there for me. I don’t even know if la cuve is still there; I hope it is. When I’m back in the UK this december, I might pop over there to find out.

E-B-G-D-A-E

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strings

This is my illustration friday for this week, theme “strings“. Pretty obvious.

I absolutely hate stringing the guitar. It’s my least favourite thing. It takes me hours, and it is torturous. I am constantly afraid of one snapping and cutting my lip, or ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe or something. It’s almost like my fear of bunsen burners, but more stupid. I’ve considered just giving up the guitar for good while restringing in the past, it’s been that bad. The guy in the shop when I bought these offered to string my guitar for me, but it would mean bringing it in, I just don’t have time. He did also try to sell me some really swanky looking guitar strings called Elixir, but I decided against them because they sounded too much like a packet of condoms.

thro’ each charter’d street

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Eagle-eyed visitors to London can see my drawings on the latest info-packed leaflets for London Walks (see walks.com), which you can pick up in any tourist-area pub in central London. They’re the oldest walking tour company in London, and I’ve provided the illustrations for their forthcoming book (all will be revealed). My mum and my sister came across the leaflet (see left) while out one day by the Thames, and mailed it out to me. The drawings are pretty small, but then I do draw pretty small.

Several years ago, I used to be a tourguide myself on the streets of London, mostly as an open-top bus tourguide for the Big Bus Company, but I did a few long walking tours as well. Those buses, now that was an education in tenacity, let me tell you. When it’s pissing with rain, the microphone has stopped working so you have to shout above the London noise, when you’re stuck in thick traffic on Bayswater or scrambling round corners in Mayfair while being attacked by trees (I was actually knocked down the stairs by a tree once; I carried on speaking, “…and on your right, that’s where the Queen was born…”), being verbally abused by cab-drivers and asked strange questions by tourists (“why is it called snappy snaps?”) or being corrected on the tiniest details by smug locals (and subsequently smirked at for correcting their correction, none more smug and local than I), and making Americans laugh with a hilarious spontaneous-sounding joke I’d actually been told by another American on the previous tour, oh I enjoyed those days a lot, and I really learnt a lot. I actually loved tourguiding in London almost as much as I love drawing, so it’s a fitting pleasure that I’m illustrating this new book by these particular tourguides who, I’m told, really know their stuff.

dial M for redrum

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Just as you get off the freeway at downtown Davis. Caffino is a drive-thru coffee booth, and Murder Burger is an old-school american diner that does incredible burgers and amazing milk-shakes. Oh, sorry Redrum Burger.
caffino & murder burger

They used to be called Murder Burger, and to most Davisites they still are. But a few years back they opened another one in some other dog-knows-where town, and someone complained that Murder Burger (“so good they’re to die for”) was not appropriate as a place to eat (even though appropriateness is usually measured by the money something makes). So they decided to change their name, and asked their customers to vote on a new name. The name that won with an overwhelming majority was, in fact, Murder Burger. So they went with the second choice, Redrum Burger (yes, I thought it meant the horse at first).

I don’t eat red meat anyway.

going strøget

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copenhagen, strøget

Drew this from a photo taken on my first trip to Denmark (strawberries, adidas shorts, 1995), strøget in Copenhagen. The photo itself is bright and sunny and colourful, but for some reason I changed it to sepia and old-fashioned. Well, it’s historical, for me. I was nineteen and adventurous (and skint). I just decided one day to go and pick jordbaer in the south of Fyn, meeting lots of interesting people along the way. Back in those days they didn’t have the long road bridges between the isles: a trip across Denmark meant getting on lots of ferries. There was a great ferry that the train rolled onto, and off again once in port, straight onto the tracks. That hot summer, the night in Copenhagen came last. I must have had about ten quid’s worth of krone left. Doesn’t get you very far in Denmark. I went to an atrociously bad hostel, paid my money, sat on the bed (with the hudnred or so other beds in the converted gym around me, got up, went to the front desk, got my krones back and went off into the night. My bags were locked at the station, and went to a karaoke bar, and while singing ‘going underground’ I told Denmark about my predicament, and I swear I didn’t have to buy another drink that whole night. I was younger then. I got on the bus for London the next morning (the bus! Back before the cheap flights boom, the 24 hour eurobus ride from hell was the way the poor travelled) I had one Danish krone left, one of those coins with a hole in it. I threaded a piece of string through it and made it into a necklace. I probably still have it somewhere.

I’ve been back a couple of times since, each with different stories. A friend of mine just had his stag do in Aarhus, another place I’ve been a couple of times; wish I could have gone this time! I could at least afford the drinks now.  I love Denmark, it’s expensive but the people really are the friendliest.