Tag: airplane

squeezy jet

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luton to lisbon
And so, I went to Portugal. After days of rain and crowds in London, it was nice to see some clear blue sky upon landing at Lisbon’s nice and modern airport. I had to first go through the mess that is Luton airport though, which seems to run on the ‘people will put up with anything’ theory (such as making people pay just to drop people off). Eventually though I was on my very orange Easyjet and flying away from England, excited about all the sketching yet to come. As ever I had to draw the view on the plane, but I had no window seat so couldn’t draw what was outside. I used my orange micron and I like the results. As I drew, attendants went up and down the aisle over and over again trying to sell goods and nonsense. Easyjet flights seem to be run by Del Boy Trotter, and it’s not as if they’re all that cheap like they used to be. Still, it got me to the actual Lisbon rather than a hundred miles away, so I’m happy. 

When I arrived in Lisbon I got myself a Lisbon Card (useful if you have time to visit all those museums and sights, a bit of a big waste of money if ultimately you don’t get to do that), and hopped on the very convenient AeroBus straight downtown. As I was sketching on the bus (below), I met a woman who teaches at a London art school and is also an art critic for various national papers, in Lisbon to cover another big art exhibition. I told her about the Symposium, and she popped by a couple of days later to meet with the organizers and the sketchers. for me, this was my first sketch in Lisbon, so I had to make it colourful! I’m getting used to whipping out the waterbrush and paints on public transport now, it’s pretty compact!

AeroBus sketch

getting to where you should be going

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sacramento to philadelphia
The first few of a good many “travelling” sketches. The first above was sketched on the flight from Sacramento to Philadelphia. I must say US Airways were pretty good. The last time I flew with them (to Vegas in February) the plane was small and couldn’t carry the weight of all its passengers. The ones I took for these longer journeys on the other hand were modern and spacious, and more than capable of carrying a few extra big-macs. When I got to Philadelphia airport, I had more than five hours to occupy myself. There are only so many airport stores to look in and departure lounge seats to draw, so I took the train into downtown Philadelphia, a very grand East Coast city with nice yellow traffic lights and ornage fire hydrants (wait for the next post!).

philadelphia train

Finally I left Philly, and got my plane back home across the Atlantic. I didn’t watch any of the offered movies, but I did play a few games of chess against the airplane computer. And beat it almost every time (except for one in which I did all I could to get a stalemate, and I got it – I aint losing to the back of a chair). Sleeping was a little more difficult. It always is. I can fall asleep on a five minute bus ride, and miss my stop, but put on a flight across the Atlantic and I’m like a Bizarro Rip van Winkle.

philly to london

go tell it on the mountain

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mt shasta, from weed airport

Sketches in my little red moleskine (I like to carry a smaller book for these very quick more scribbly sketches now) on the trip up to Oregon last Friday. It’s a long hot journey, and we usually have to stop once or twice. One place we like to get out and stretch our legs is at the Weed Airport (yes, it’s really called Weed, and boy do they make a deal out of their mildly amusing name), beneath the most incredible mountain I’ve ever seen (perhaps even more so than Mont St. Victoire), Mount Shasta. It’s a hundred degrees on the first day of July, so it’s refreshing to see so much snow on the peak. Sketchbooks out. Of course, I now share my paints with my son, so he likes to get his own stamp on my sketchbook now. There is his version of the mountain and the sun and the plane just below there. Beside it, a windsock, you gotta draw the windsock.

mt shasta by lukewindsock at weed airport

in car to oregon

those magnificent men with their flying machines

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toy plane

So, after deliberation and destruction, a UN resolution and no-fly zone was finally ordered for Libya, but despite an apparent declaration of ceasefire, Gaddafi’s forces still pressed on with brutal attacks on the Libyan people, and now we have airstrikes by the West and who knows what next. I just hope it doesn’t mean more suffering, but sadly, it usually does.

I’ve been sketching some of my son’s toys lately in my small WH Smith’s sketchbook, and I started on the ‘air force’ the other day with the small yellow ‘spitfire’ Playmobil plane above. While the rains crashed down outside today (cancelling the Davis sketchcrawl) I sketched some more of the flying machines.

toy helicopter

Here’s the toy Duplo fire helicopter. It goes with the previously sketched fire truck. Below, the Playmobil police helicopter – it is a favourite one this. And finally, a yellow toy F-16 jet.

toy police helicopter

toy F-16

Next: trains…

a visit to vegas

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room at the mirage

We went to Las Vegas for the weekend, to celebrate my wife’s birthday. We’ve been several times before (we got married there), and this time we stayed at the Mirage, as we were going to see the Beatles ‘Love’ show by Cirque du Soleil (which was incredible). The rooms at the Mirage are very nice. I had to sketch ours.

Below, another airplane sketch. Our flight was full, on a pretty small and veyr cramped US Airways flight. The flight was so full that after everyone was on the plane, the attendants asked that two people volunteer to get off because the plane was too heavy. That didn’t make me nervous at all. 

flight to vegas

I managed to get in quite a bit of sketching, which I’ll post shortly…

leavin’ on a jet plane

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Happy New Year! I got back into Davis today, after two and a half weeks in snowy England. I’ve never seen a winter like it in London, but I still managed to do some sketching, though probably less than usual. The scanning and posting will be an ongoing process. Here’s a good place to start: my first and last sketches of the trip, both on BA jumbo jets, drawn in my Moleskine diary.
flying British Airways to London

Here’s the thing: I hate flying. Not in a BA Baracas “fool aint gettin me in no plane sucker” way. I hate airports, the ever-decreasing baggage allowances,  packing suitcases, Heathrow, overhead lockers, the toilets, the engine noise, the fact it takes me two days to get over the ear-popping thing and I hate that sleeping on a plane is practically impossible. Flying is not my favourite thing, but it’s a necessary necessity. Carbon footprint my bottom. 

Below is the sketch I did while waiting to leave London yesterday, New Year’s Eve. You can sense the dread.  

leaving London behind, New Year's Eve

And so it is a new year. In fact today is 1-1-11, which must be significant. New Year’s Resolutions? I have no idea about that, but I had three doughnuts for breakfast. Perfect jetlag cure. Art goals? Just keep on going, keep on drawing everything around me.

2010 was an interesting year for sure, and very full on art-wise. Some interesting projects, some interesting travels and of course the Portland Urban Sketching Symposium in the middle of it all, spurring the creativity of the rest of the year. We held a couple of great sketchcrawls in Davis in the Fall, and a third ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ crawl will take place on January 22 to coincide with the worldwide sketchcrawl. There are more fun things happening soon as well so I’ll keep you posted.

But for now I’ll just say happy new year, I hope 2011 is filled with fun and if you haven’t yet taken up sketching as a way to record your world, why not do so now? It’s so much fun!

fly away, pete

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It’s going to take me some time to add all the pictures and tell all the stories about the 1st International Sketching Symposium in Portland. I am still ringing with excitement about all the things I learned and all the people I met, rubbing shoulders with 80 other people who ‘get it’, and all the creative ideas that started to explode from my head as soon as got on the plane back to Sacramento. I’ve not been this excited aboout creativity in many years, and am eager to charge headlong into exploring more ideas. However, it’s time to start scanning those drawings and documenting for those of you who weren’t able to be there. Matthew Brehm, in his excellent lecture on the history of sketching as a social activity, called it the “Woodstock of Sketching”, and I agree, it probably was (apart from the drugs, sex and nakedness aspect of course).

Anyway, in linear fashion, I’m going to start at the beginning, Sacramento Airport.

sacramento airport
sacramento airport

I’m not a huge fan of airports, or flying in general. I was when I was younger, but nowadays I struggle a bit with them. Have you seen that film ‘Up in the Air’? Yeah, that guy’s not me. (Apart from the good looks of course; only joking).

On the plane, I sat by the window for the obligatory ‘view from the plane’ sketch. The stewardess brought round sodas and juices to the passengers. I forgot to ask for one without ice (they come in plastic cups rather than little cans, like on Virgin and other flights). When my diet coke came, fully iced, and i asked if it were possible to have it without ice, the stewardess gave me a look like i had asked her to tell the pilot to fly the plane upside down. Still, five minutes later she brought me a diet coke without ice.

“Where are you from?” the older guy next to me said suddenly, his wife looking on.
“Britain,” I said.
“People in Britain like their drinks warm?”
“No,” I sighed, “it’s because when I’m done with this drink I don’t want a cup of ice just sitting there.” Well, I don’t, I have nowhere to put it, and I really don’t like swallowing the ice. There’s no drain on the plane. It could get knocked over, onto my sketchbook, or my laptop. No explanation needed.

Apparently there was. “Well, in America,” he announced, his wife nodding, “people drink their sodas with ice in it.”
“No, mate,” I said, “it’s nothing to do with that. I don’t like ice.”
The man and his wife raised their eyebrows. I imagined they would be talking about this over dinner later with their friends, all drinking fully iced sodas, that crazy British guy who just doesn’t understand American customs.

I brought my own bottle of diet coke on the flight back. Some things are just too complicated to explain.

Symposium blog: http://pdx2010.urbansketchers.org/

up, up and away

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airplane toy

The ‘Little People’ airplane, we all had one as kids, and my two-year-old has one. He loves airplanes, loves to read about them, even knows his Spitfires from his Messerschmidts, and loves airports; he’s been on enough flights already, he’s an old hand. This plane is full of wooden letter-blocks, which in his universe are actually suitcases, luggage, and that makes sense.

This drawing is appropriate, as this weekend is the finale of plane-crash drama/mystery series Lost, a show I’ve followed avidly ever since we moved out here. It has been a great show (particularly season 4), but last year started to get a little, um, confused, and this season has been a let down to say the least. It’s almost as if they decided all those things which they built up as important over the years – the Others, Dharma Initiative, Ben vs Widmore, even the time travel stuff introduced last year – are in fact irrelevant because they’ve changed the story. They had to resolve the Widmore character (aka Jim out of Neighbours) so they brought him back and had him shot in the cupboard like a, well, a pussy to be frank. All season they’ve been showing us this alternate timeline and wasting time with new characters who are ultimately completely unimportant (ahem, Ilana). So the long awaited finale is tomorrow, and rather than excited, I am feeling like I just want it to be over and done with. At the least, I want to feel that all those years geting involved with the show and watching it with eager anticipation were not all for nothing. I don’t get into TV shows much, so it would be nice for it to be at the least satisfactory.