to heaven in a food cart

November 19, 2012November 19, 201216 Comments

Food glorious food. Ok, this is the last of the Portland sketches that you are getting. That was one productive little trip. One thing I must point out is that I hardly ever ate indoors. Despite the rain, I only wanted to eat from the many delicious food carts that dot the city so liberally. Now along with the rule about going to Portland and sketching bridges, it’s also true that no visit to PDX is complete without sketching food carts. The first evening i was there I headed to the large collectio of carts downtown over at SW Alder. Most were closed, it being dark and damp, but I got an absolutely amazing red curry dish from a popular looking place called “I Like Thai Food” (and I do like Thai food, for sure). It was a pretty massive box of yummy food, and only cost $5. I sat on a bench near Powell’s to eat it, savouring every massive spicy bite. I cam back a few days later, on a sunny autumnal Monday, and sketched it alongside a few other carts, before getting another $5 red curry from a different cart around the corner (called Grandma’s Thai or something), just to compare. That too was delicious, but I think ‘I Like Thai food’ was a fair bit better. There were so many carts to choose from, though, such as the Flying Scotsman (fish and chips, yes, but also deep-fried Mars bars – I was too full to indulge, but next time, next time…).

On the Sunday I was exploring Hawthorne in the rain, food carts were a constant topographical feature. There is a small gaggle of them located around 12th and Hawthorne, including Potato Champion, who specialize in sauce-drowned Belgian frites (always a winner with the Scully tastebuds), and I got a decent poutine, and sketched as best as I could (there was shelter from the rain, but that morning’s mild hangover was still being nursed). I do think that if we lived in Portland, we would very likely eat from food carts about 75% of the time we ate anything, so abundant and varied are they. I am sure many of them are not very good, too, in fact I had one wrap type thing at a cart in the Saturday Market that was very unimpressive, to the point I cannot remember anything about it or even what style of food it was (it must have had some memory-wiping drug in it or something), but on the whole the Portland food cart experience was extremely promising. I know many urban sketchers like to go inside and warm up to eat and linger around a table, but for me food carts are the ultimate urban sketcher’s friend, because you get to stay outside, eat and just carry on drawing.

If you want to know more about the food carts in Portland, this is a good website: http://www.foodcartsportland.com/.

space travel’s in my blood

November 19, 20125 Comments

Here’s a sketch I did one lunchtime this week, of the old phone box and Mustard seed restaurant in downtown Davis. There’s no phone in the phone box, it’s just a bit of anglophile decoration. They lock the door now, which is a shame, as me and my young son always used to stop by and pretend it was a rocket ship, and we would go inside and fly off to Saturn, and maybe stop off on the asteroid belt, before coming back to Davis again. It’s good to get off the planet, every now and then.

I sketched this in the watercolour Moleskine (#11) with that uniball signo um-151 brown pen I love so much.

‘ark now ‘ear…

November 17, 20122 Comments

Still more to scan and post from Portland, still more NaNoDrawMo pieces to post…but here is a sketch from this morning while watching the football. IT was the North London Derby, Spurs v Arsenal, a game we (Spurs) had to win, a game we lost last year 5-2. Never again. Er, except today, when we lost 5-2. Not a great way to start the weekend!

Drawn in Uniball Signo um-151 (brown) in Moleskine #11. Outside, a big storm rolls over Davis, inside I have a cold.

autumn at the art center

November 14, 20122 Comments

(click on the image for a larger version)

Last Sunday was the November “Let’s Draw Davis” sketchcrawl, in the conveniently-located-across-the-street-from-me Community Park. Since it had been prophesied to be a cold day, only a few of us showed up, greeted by crisp autumn sunshine and blazing fall colours. after a very quick ‘people’ sketch or two I set to work on a panorama. The previous Friday evening I had attended a fun event at the Davis Art Center called the ‘Arty Party’, in which there was lots of drawing, some drinking and eating, and I even won a game of Pictionary, a game I’ve not played in a couple of decades, surprisingly. It was nice to get out and be social and talk to people about art, and in fact they will be selling some cards of my drawings in their annual Holiday Sale (Nov 30-Dec 2), including a recent one of the Art Center. I was talking about how I’d never drawn the building before, because it wasn’t an easy one to draw – trees in the way, lots of angles, it had always seemed very difficult. And then almost as soon as I had said it, I said to myself, difficult, huh? Really? So I determined to give it another go. I liked my first version – it says ‘Davis Art Center’ on it – but really wanted the panoramic version in my Moleskine sketchbook. I stood in the sunshine for just over two hours (my wife even came by and brought me a sandwich!) and sketched away. I started in the middle and worked my way outwards.

I didn’t end up doing any more sketches on the sketchcrawl (I popped back home to call my Mum in England and have a cup of tea), but met with the group at the library afterwards, where we all showed off our sketches. In the end I think about eight people came, which was pretty good for a cold day (though it wasn’t cold, really California, really..). Next one will be in mid-December, when it might really be cold…let’s keep drawing Davis!

Finally, here is the drawing of Davis Art Center I started on location before I went to Portland (and finished when I got back), showing the main entrance and part of a sculpture in the foreground. I love this place, they do a lot of good for our artistic community in Davis, and long may they do so.

nanodrawmo 2012 – part 2

November 14, 201210 Comments

The 50-drawings-in-November project lurches forward like a galactic starship, full of little ink drawings of various things, along with short, often timed (2 to 5 mins) writing exercises, in which there is no editing or forward planning, just a ‘see what happens’ thing. Here I am already verging from the EveryDayMatters challenges, my original ‘theme’; for the most part, I drew the picture and tried to find an EDM challenge to match up to it. It’s more liberating just to draw. Darth Vader’s lightsabre? I sat there with the plastic version on the edge of the bed and sketched away. Enjoy.

The only one not drawn from life was Strasbourg Cathedral. To be honest it wasn’t even drawn from any one photo, being such a hard thing to photograph, so I looked at various pictures and reconstructed it face on. It only took 25 minutes, so I was pretty happy with that. The writing took five. The project continues apace…

yo-ho-ho!

November 12, 20122 Comments

Yarrr! Or is it Arrr? I never did learn to speak Pirate. I did get a big dose of Pirate while in Portland though, and what fun it was. On the Sunday evening I attended ‘Dr.Sketchy’s Anti-Art School‘, the Portland branch of the national Dr.Sketchy’s thing that is popping up all over the country. I had never been to a figure drawing meet before, and this one was a lot of fun, featuring Portland’s ‘premier pirate group’, PDXYAR. It was so much fun! The pirates really were very elaborately dressed (and just as elaborately undressed) and stood in a variety of poses lasting between two and twenty minutes each – not an easy task, but one they performed incredibly well.

As I say, I had a blast. It was so liberating to mess around with quick figure drawing, just focusing on the gestures as much as possible. The pirates had so much personality, and a decent array of weaponry.

I tried a few sketches on the pad of grey paper I had picked up at Muse art shop on Hawthorne. It was different; I think it might be more effective for pastel work, but I’m having fun with it.

And I even won a prize! A PDXYAR beerglass (with a beer in it) and rum shot glass. I shall treasure them. I guess I’ll have to get me some rum. I chatted to some of the pirates afterwards, a great bunch of lads and lasses (one was even from north Davis!), and I became convinced I wanted to be a pirate too. I went home to the hotel with my head lost in thoughts of sailing the seven seas, parrots on my shoulder, avasting ye landlubbers, cutlasses swashing buckles and so on. I do have a pirate-like name, Captain Scully, yar. Well ok, maybe I won’t make it as a pirate, but next time I’m in Portland I’ll certainly try to sketch them again, I dare say with a bottle of rum. Yar!!!

You can check out PDXYAR at http://pdxyar.org. Yar! If you’re in Portland, try to catch them at the Swashbuckler’s Ball on November 17. Yar! You can see other drawings done by my fellow sketchers that night at the Dr.Sketchy’s/PDXYAR Facebook event page.

a little bit belge

November 12, 2012November 12, 2012Leave a comment

On the rainy Sunday in SE Portland, it was necessary to occasionally go inside. One very cool place I visited was Bazi Bierbrasserie, a Belgian beer cafe near Hawthorne. I didn’t realize at the time I was sketching in Belgian colours, but it makes sense. I came with fellow urban sketcher Kalina Wilson, who was showing me around the neighbourhood before that evening’s Dr. Sketchy’s pirate-sketching event, which you’ll hear more about in my next post. Naturally, I had the Kwak, I love the Kwak and its funny glass, it’s one of my top three favourite Belgian beers (the others being Charles Quint and Fruit Defendu, if you’re wondering). I don’t recall the name of the beer Kalina had, Draak I think it was, but thankfully she sketched it wonderfully here. (I’m a fan of her work, and her creativity has certainly influenced my own stuff over the past couple of years in various ways, though our styles are very different – you should check out her website Geminica). The proprietor of the bar complemented us on our sketches and told me about the different beers they occasionally get in there from around Belgium, I mentioned I’d lived in Charleroi for a year. That’s where I got a real beer-ducation, talking to locals at La Cuve a Biere, where I would go most nights and fill books with writing, before I was so into urban sketching. I’ve often thought it might be fun to turn some of the writing from my Belgian diaries into a kind of comic, that rainy, clumsy year.

a portland beer-ducation

November 11, 20122 Comments

Cascade Brewing Barrel House in SE Portland. On the Saturday evening in Portland I was cream-crackered after a day of sketching, and stayed in my hotel watching the San Francisco Giants storing their way through Game Three of the World Series. It was relaxing, I wrote a couple of postcards and finished off some sketches. I popped down to the hotel lobby to access something called the internet, and watched an inning or so at the hotel bar over a beer, listening to large-haired ladies talking in sour tones about their colleagues, while a baseball-capped business-man offered idle chat about the political attack ads being the same here as they are ‘back home’, and all of them being lies, lies and more lies. Occasionally, groups of costumed people wafted by and disappeared into the halloween partying night. Well, fun though that was, lying in bed watching the baseball was significantly better.

When the baseball was over, however, I was feeling nice and relaxed, and considered staying in and watching a Thor cartoon on my iPod. However apparently Portland is a really fun and interesting place with exceptionally good beers, and so I popped out to the streetcar stop and headed south. I had a Map full of Things to Do, courtesy of my Portland sketching friend Kalina who had prior to my trip put together an extensive list of things I might like to do on a Google Map, for which I am eternally grateful. One place I thought I’d head to was Cascade, a small independent brewery which has an excellent reputation for craft beer, particularly its sours. I wasn’t sure I fancied a sour, having not really liked the one I’d had from Russian River that time all that much, and opted for a Dunkel Weizen, followed by a Belgian Amber. It wasn’t super busy, but those present were of course all extremely beer-knowledgable and more than happy to impart their wisdom (as was everyone in Portland). When I was done, they recommended another nearby place, the Green Dragon (which was also on my To Go To list) and so I headed on over, and was massively impressed by the selection, though also intimidated, and clearly needed help. Fortunately the excellent staff there showed me the way, and gave me (to use their word) a good “beer-ducation” (cheers Nick et al!). Portland is like the University of Craft Beer, a great place for beer-ducation.

nanodrawmo 2012 – part 1

November 10, 2012November 10, 20123 Comments

Back in 2010 I heard about NaNoDrawMo – it’s a bit like the annual month-long writing challenge NaNoWriMo (in which you must write a 50,000 word novel in a month), but this is for drawing, fifty drawings, a drawing being worth etc etc. In that year I drew fifty fire hydrants (and other metal pipes that come out of the ground). You may recall I like drawing them. Last year I was drawing people, but it ultimately didn’t get finished. This year however I am doing a series based on the EDM ‘Every Day Matters’ challenges, with a twist – a little piece of freestyle unedited and possibly nonsensical (or the opposite) writing to go with it. Given how much I have to do these days I might be barmy doing this project (I am), and over this next month you will get to see just how barmy (very), so for the sake of being concise I’ll present them as they are on the pages of my book, in groups of ten.
If you can’t read the writing don’t worry, just look at the pictures. In fact, just look at the pictures anyway…

art farm 2012

November 9, 2012November 9, 20122 Comments

Last Friday I was invited to sketch at a special event in Woodland, just north of Davis, called ‘Art Farm’. It is an event organized by Yolo Arts, held at Gallery 625, right by the courthouse in downtown Woodland (do you know, in seven years exactly of living in Davis I have never once been to downtown Woodland?). The main exhibit and auction (or Art Harvest) was made up of exceptional works of art by local artists, many of which were painted on location at farms around yolo county. These are organized monthly plein-air meetings called the Art & Ag Project – I’d been told about them before, but haven’t participated msyelf. Anyway, I was kindly invited to come and record the event in my particular sketching way, and for three solid hours I got to work.

I was asked specifically to draw the table above, Good Humus, and it was such a colourful and friendly thing to draw. However, I did have to use every single one of my urban sketching skills to get this drawing. I had only a tiny spot of space, and I was sketching in a larger watercolour pad, surrounded by art-loving people carrying wine-glasses and plates and queuing up for arugula salad. I used x-ray vision to see through people for the stall, drawing it piece by piece as best as I could. I had to do the colours afterwards, there being no way I could stand in that crowd with my paints, but that meant taking some serious notes and mental images. All the while, I hummed David Devant songs to myself, and chatted amiably with people from the Yolo art world; “here’s my card”. I’m quite ecstatic about the results. I hope they are too!

The remaining sketches were much less hectically achieved, but I bolted through them without stopping for a sip of wine or a nibble of cheese. I had been very nervous about this – my stomach was jumping about like a bag of kittens – after all it was a sketching job among some incredible artists, but as someone tweeted to me that day, “you have trained for this.” I kept thinking that phrase, of course I have, I do this stuff all the time. I stayed focused and relaxed, smiled, spoke freely where needed but didn’t get sidetracked. I missed a lot of the live auction – it was just too crowded, but at least I’d drawn the gallery exhibit before the people came – and I sat on the floor to draw the autumnal display at the entrance with the beloved brown pen. I managed a couple more people sketches too, one of Fred Manas, who tried to tempt me back into red-meat with his sausages (I declined, but I’m sure they are very nice), and the band’s very soulful singer Tessie, pink-haired and with Day-of-the-Dead make-up, who I captured very quickly halfway through their last number. The wine glass wasn’t mine, i was drawing someone else’s dregs, but thought it a nice way to close it out. On the whole this was a fun evening, I saw some familiar faces, and I am really glad to have been invited to be involved.

And then I had to get home, and that is a whole ‘nother story. I might even write a comic about it, called “Running Frantically in the Dark”. Not to worry, it ends with me finally getting home and having some noodles for a midnight dinner, but I think next time I do something like this out of town I will have them call me a cab…