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.
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.
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.
petescully 