I’ve drawn the old City Hall, but have never drawn the current one. Davis City Offices, from where Davis is governed by the City Council, are housed in an old brick high school building on Russell, a lovely building to draw you might think, if it weren’t for those trees in the way. I’ve never really found a good view which isn’t mainly foliage, but this one from across the street is as good as I could get. I’ve been in here once, to sketch an arts council meeting. There is a plaque inside apparently which lists the name of every “Davis Citizen of the Year” since 1945 (hint hint, you know).
Sketched in Watercolour Moleskine #12 with a brown uni-ball signo um-151, coloured in when I got home. There are a lot of buildings along this street I’ve meant to sketch for a while but haven’t gotten around to, time to start checking off that list.
Perfectly bright weather – but I underestimated the wind a little. Well, I didn’t really but I was still getting blown about all over the place. I sat on the sidewalk beside my big Alphabet Moon bag (I had just been there to buy a wooden railway bridge; so sad that it’s closing down, but all of Davis was in there today buying out the stock). This whole thing took about an hour and a half, in my large Canson watercolour pad, most ot the paint being done on site (the rest – the sky, the greenery – being completed over a beer at Woodstock’s around the corner while waiting for the bus, out of the wind).
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 