do something pretty while you can

March 30, 2011March 30, 20111 Comment

Wow, it’s warm! For what had been a very wet month, March is ending up with weather in the 80s. This is the Cross Cultural Center at UC Davis; I don’t know why it’s cross though. It is one of many buildings on campus that look a bit like this. I cycled past it the other day and thought, better sketch that some day, so at lunchtime today I did. I drew most of it there, sat beneath the shade of a tree, but the lunch bell rang and so I finished off the rest of the detailing, and the colour, later at home.

So Spring is here, and that means Picnic Day is upon us. Being on a worldwide sketchcrawl day, April 16, I might not bother with Picnic Day this year. It’s always too crowded, and rowdy, and I always struggle to draw there. I don’t like crowds all that much. So I’ll probably go to sketchcrawl in San Francisco. They will be sketchcrawling in the Mission, I love it down there. For more details, go to the 31st Sketchcrawl Forum.

Don’t forget though, this Saturday April 2nd, sketchcrawl in the Arboretum! For more details, go to the Flickr group. See you Saturday!

but nervous all the same

March 18, 20112 Comments

The sunshine is deceiving, because the rains are back, and in greater numbers. It was sunny yesterday though, on Saint Patrick’s Day, so I cycled downtown at lunchtime and drew a quick-ish one of a house on the corner of 3rd and D, I’d wanted to sketch it for some time. I was hopeful, but not that optimistic that his sunshine would stick around for the weekend, but now it looks very likely that heavy rain will stop play at the scheduled Davis sketchcrawl this Saturday.

how does your garden grow

February 14, 2011February 14, 2011Leave a comment

On Friday lunchtime, I sketched inside the Robert Mondavi Institute for food and wine and other stuff, because I needed to get out and sketch and it’s a couple of minutes from where I work. I have drawn inside here before, from a different angle, and they have an incredible garden full of all kinds of plants and herbs and lemons and what not. There’s a nice smell as you sit and sketch. It’s called the Good Life Garden. I’m not making it up; I was expecting Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall to turn up, or at the very least, Neil from the Young Ones.

I used a white gel pen to emphasize the bare trees. This sunny February weather is amazing! I want to do a long sketch of the building from the new vinyards at some point, but I think time of day is importnat. Lunchtime sketching can be a little frustrating – even though the light is still great, it’s better in the early mornings and late afternoons. At least I have this sunlight. Some places are grey and cloudy and drizzly at this time of year.

shard times

February 3, 2011February 3, 2011Leave a comment

This is the Shard, a brand new skyscraper under construction in London, near London Bridge. It’s called the Shard because the architect is a big fan of The Dark Crystal. It will be the tallest building in Britain when completed, and London’s skyline will be changed forever (or, until the next tall unusual building is finished, and there are more on the way in). Eventually it will look like a huge glass spike pointing at the clouds. I sketched it stood near London Bridge station after a morning out by the river with family, really cold but not as freezing as before. I had to draw quickly because I was off to meet my friend up near Tottenham Court Road station (and I was about to discover just how different London looks now, and how much of central London is like a building site – much of Oxford Street appears to be gone! But there is a Chipotle on Charing Cross Road, which made me happy). I like to draw in-progress sketches of buildings, because once they are finished and iconic it’s fun to remember how they looked going up.

thoughts meander like a restless wind

October 12, 2010October 12, 20102 Comments

Spread 6 of the Davis Moleskine project. This one is down at D Street, and this building is home to Antiques Plus. It took me a couple of lunchtimes to draw this – I am still getting used to drawing bigger like this, on different paper, with a different pen. But the effect is very enjoyable!

It’s a nice little corner of Davis, this. There is a small gathering of alleys to the left which lead through to E Street, filled with little nooks and shops, the odd cafe, and the Mustard Seed Restaurant. Beyond the antiques shop is the Pence Gallery.

We’ve had some odd weather here in Davis. It cooled down a little, but then got really hot again – it was 90 degrees yesterday. But there was also a terrifying Mistral-like wind howling day and night. Cycling home, I saw scores – probably fifty or sixty – huge birds, hawks most likely, flying about in circles en masse above the trees by the creek. I’d never seen so many birds of prey like that, it was very eery. “Earthquake weather,” my wife said. Not been one yet. It’s all very strange.

LA galaxy

September 20, 20102 Comments

Part two of my downtown Los Angeles sketches. I slowly went uphill. On another day when I have more time (and I said this three years ago when I last decided not to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art) I’ll go to the MOCA. On this day, I was grabbing as many sketches as I could, and stood outside it (leaning against a newspaper stand of course), and drew the space age Walt Disney Concert hall (I say ‘space age’, I mean ‘the Death Star after a fight with Magneto’), by the legendary Frank Gehry. It’s home to the LA Philharmonic.

I also drew the downtown Public Library. That’s a pretty nice building too, but I didn’t have time to go in and browse. Well, I know what I’m like with libraries, I’d be there forever. A fire hydrant just happened to poke its way into view.

And below, looking up, and looking down. Bye-bye downtown LA.

this ole house

August 22, 2010August 20, 20105 Comments

Drawn at eight in the morning, while sitting on the porch of the cute little house in Pacific Grove; from the east, golden sunlight peeped through the fog that ghosted in from the west. This old house was right opposite and I was determined not to leave without sketching it, and I’m well pleased with it. I wish, I wish, I wish I could fill an entire sketchbook just with drawings of Pacific Grove houses. Now there’s a thought! How much fun would that be?

an afternoon around pacific grove

August 20, 2010August 20, 20102 Comments

While people who nap take naps, the people who sketch go out and sketch. It’s my way of napping, and for someone who likes drawing big old houses, Pacific Grove is like a dream. There were so many to choose from, and such little time, that I settled on this big green hotel, the Centrela. The ocean fog was descending a little and making the world feel damp, but that’s partly what I came there for, from the hot dry Sacramento Valley. When I was finished sketching this, I spoke to a man who was from South Harrow. Small world, huh. Not that I’m from Harrow of course, no no I’m from Burnt Oak, but you know, London/Middlesex connection.

I have a thing about fire hydrants, as you know. So I took the time to sketch some. I like the little one with the red top. I understand that the colours on top of the fire hydrants have something to do with water pressure? That’s what I heard, and I’m not going to let the ability to just look it up quickly on Google distract me from finding out if it’s true or not. I think of them as little characters, with little Smurf hats, guarding the street corners like gargoyles.

And here is a mermaid. You didn’t know mermaids existed, did you. Well, this is proof, isn’t it (not that it would stand up in court). She was lolling outside a boutique on Lighthouse Avenue, covered in seashells and beads. I wanted to ask if there existed types of mermaids with the fish bit on top and the legs on the bottom (I think I saw that in Red Dwarf once).

the return of the king (hall)

June 20, 20103 Comments

In Summer 2007 I found a pleasant spot by Putah Creek with a nice view of Mrak Hall, and drew it. In the foreground, across the green pea-soup of an early-Summer creek, two small green hillocks. I came back a year later to sketch the same spot; the hillocks were gone, razed to make way for the proposed King Hall law school extension. Fences were up, construction yet to begin. A year later I sketched there again, and the shell was up, the view of Mrak blocked. Another year has passed, and King Hall’s extension is almost complete. I drew the above picture on Friday lunchtime, while trying to avoid the England match, which I was recording to watch later (little did I know it was truly worth avoiding). I think it’s interesting to see how a view has altered over the few years that I’ve lived here.

The drawings from 2007-2009 are below.

station to station

June 14, 2010June 14, 2010Leave a comment

The mercury rose to there or thereabouts, and it felt very, very hot. I got out on my bike, my freckly celtic skin plastered in sunscreen, not sure what I wanted to draw, It’s like going to the library, you know; you think you’ve read all the books you could possibly want to read, and then you realise: hang on, I’ve not read Fahrenheit 451, I’m going to read that! So in what felt like a similar temperature, I sketched the train station. I have in fact drawn this building before though, so that analogy doesn’t really work, but it was like, 2006, and I didn’t really like it. I don’t like drawing this building, attractive and sketchable though it is. Something about the arches puts me off. However, my toddler loves trains and I knew he’d like it (see how he influences my sketching decisions now, it’s like he makes my mind up for me; well, someone has to).

Incidentally, I did read Fahrenheit 451. I didn’t like it. I got to about four pages from the end and never picked it up again, like, I couldn’t care how it finished. I felt a bit like that with the last season of Lost, too. I’m four pages to the end of moleskine #5 too… but this one I can’t wait to finish.