I finished the Villefranche-sur-Mer picture by adding a minimal amount of colour. I think I like it minimal, any more may have taken away from it. If you’re wondering where the Mer is in Villefranche, well it is behind me in this shot. I may draw the other side as well, because that was a lovely view downhill to the harbour.
When I was last in Villefranche-sur-Mer, the beautiful old Mediterranean port nestled between Nice and Monaco, I took this photo of Rue Eglise (having just eaten at that cafe and sketched the sea) and told myself I’d draw a picture of it when I got home. That was over six years ago. Yesterday I finally got the photo out and started drawing, because I was playing with perspective in my messy sketchbook (see the quick watercolour sketch below) and wanted something nice to draw.
One thing I recall is that Villefranche was where they set that film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. That’s a good movie. I especially like that Emperor Palpatine plays Michael Caine’s butler. I stopped off here on my way back to London from Aix-en-Provence, having been out here to visit some old friends and watch their play. I was flying from
a quick watercolour sketch
Nice that evening, and so I whiled away a few hours by the sea at Villefranche. The old town is especially nice. I’d love to go back there to draw.
Well, I will have to make do with my old photos for now, I’m too far away. I did a watercolour study, primarily to work out how the perspective lines worked. It’s messy and quick but I quite like it, and sometimes wish I did more of my sketch work like that, if only so I could get better at the technique. But I love drawing in pen too much! The version at the top is not the ultimately finished version – I will add some watercolour, if only just to tint it. But I like how it looks anyhow. I think it’s quite nice.
Number 19 of 30. This is the bathroom. I do only ever take showers, and showers are very nice. Especially when it is hot, there’s nothing like the energy of a shower. But I love baths. Or, rather, used to love them, when I could actually be bothered to take them. It’s probably because I grew up with a bath, and showers were something you only saw at swimming pools. Plus, when I was a kid, I hated washing my hair, because I hated water getting in my eyes. It was the absolute worst part of the day, for all involved. I could not bear it. They may as well have been pouring hydrochloric acid, rather than warm water and shampoo. And conditioner! Hah, I never understood why I needed conditioner, I kept my hair short. They did get me one of those things that go on your head to stop the water getting in your eyes, a foam circle that made me look like the planet Saturn. Hey, it worked. But even as I got older and washed my hair myself, I developed ways to avoid the shower head. I would fill the sink with water and dunk my head into it to wash my hair. Yes I’d bang my ears on the taps from time to time, and yes I’d have to refill the sink a couple of times, and yes I’d splash water onto the floor, but I got my hair clean, and on my terms. So it may be all of this that explains why, though I’m totally fine with the shower, I’ll always be a bath person. A bath person who only ever takes showers. So I’m a bit contrary, nothing new there.
Having just drawn Mrak from the other side of Putah Creek, and noted over the past few years its vanishing appearance, I chose to draw from the front side (or it may be the back; like Buckingham Palace, the front is really the back and vice versa).
And naturally, I have drawn it before, and therefore you get to see how the view is slowly vanishing even on this side, as a forest grows at its very toes. Well, not exactly, more that the last time I drew it was late Fall or early Winter (whichever it is called here), and the trees did not have many leaves. But it illustrates the recurring theme. That drawing was way back at the start of Moleskine #2; I am now more than halfway through Moleskine #4.
And so back to the as yet unnamed series! We’re in the second half now, 16 of 30. This is me looking up at my shelf. The middle part of the words have been expressed before. Oh, I have always stayed up late. I seem unable to let go of the day, for some reason. It’s not simply, “I can’t sleep”, not that at all, it’s just I don’t get tired until late. I get a burst of energy, my mind starts thinking of all these things, I draw pictures, I don’t know. Whenever I have tried to go to bed earlier, I do lie in bed awake, unable to sleep, or I wake up at all sorts of funny hours. When I was younger though, I used to be able to stay up all night, no problem; nowadays if I do that I’m suffering for days. That’s age, I guess. I’m not descended from early-to-bedders, either.
Prisoner Cell Block H…now that was my favourite show. I watched it for years; it was the first run in the UK, but it was many years behind Australia. Bea Smith, the Freak, Vinegar Tits Vera Bennett, Frankie Doyle, all classic characters. Now of course I’m going to get google search engines sending fellow Prisoner fans this way. The search engines have been sending some funny things here lately. On WordPress they tell you which searches have led people to your blog. I wish I’d documented them all, some have been hilarious. “Pissing at bus-stop” for some bizarre reason sends people here; why are so many people googling that though? “Arsenal Sketchbook” sent someone here once. But today I noticed that someone googled “Peter Scully my tour guide was useless”, and came to my blog (was that you? if so, what’s that all about?). That made me crack up laughing. Is it someone telling me about their useless tour guide, or are they saying that I was their guide and was useless (which I would contest, since I’ve not been a tourguide myself for many years so nobody who took my tour would remember my name, and anyway, I was bloody good…). Either way, I won’t lose any sleep over it. If I ever go to bed, that is.
And so onwards and upwards with the 23rd Sketchcrawl; the Mission gradually became the Castro, and I chose to sit right in the middle of the sidewalk and draw some very colourful buildings on Sanchez.
I used a Pigma Micron 05 for this. I have been using them more and more, rather than the 01s I normally go with. 
I sat patiently and drew this, and passers-by were pleasant and didn’t disturb, although one young couple did drop some litter, right next to me, a plastic fruit carton. I don’t like people who drop litter (and no jokes about dirty sanchez, please). I was going to add the colour to this drawing there and then, but sitting on the floor was starting to get uncomfortable (I was rather hoping someone might offer me a chair), so I added the colour when I got home.
Below is the Castro theatre itself; I sketched (in copic 01) this while leaning on a newspaper stand at Harvey Milk Plaza. There was a Silent Film Festival going on at the time (shhh!). The Castro is the main gay area of the city; if you saw the recent biopic Milk, about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the US, you would recognize the sights, including his old shop on Castro Street, while walking round. Up above the streets and houses, rainbows were flying high.
This was almost the last drawing of the day…but there is still one more to come…
Do people even use phoneboxes any more? I barely even use my cellphone. I have a pay-as-you-go plan, which is not like the one I have on my still-active English phone (which still has the plan set up years ago on one-2-one, even has that logo on the screen!). No the one I have here means that you spend $25 to top it up fro three months. If you don’t add more money by the end of the three months, not only can you not use the phone but you lose whatever money you have left (and since I never use it, that’s usually most of it). If you renenw, it doesn’t just add three months onto whenever your three months is up, it just goes three months from whenever you topped up, so essentially you lose days, unless you renew right on the last day. Confused? I am. I have never liked mobile phones here. It’s just incredible to me that you get charged for receiving a call. That’s why I never give people my number, because I’ll never pick up if I don’t recognise it (for a while I was getting a lot of marketing calls, especially around the time of the election).
Speaking of cold calls, I hate those ones that have that pre-recorded message, “this is your final notification to renew your car insurance”, or some such, when yesterday and the day before and the day before that were the final norifications, and tomorrow too, all from companies I’ve never done business with. I hate the robots. At least with real people calling I can antagonize them a bit (sometimes I talk reeeeallllyyy reeeeeaaaallllyyyyy slowly), but even then my heart’s not in it, and I feel sorry for them. After all, everyone’s gotta work. I had to do it, once, for about a week and a half, many many years ago. It was not fun, and the guy running the show (I think he was called ‘Boyd’ or something) fancied himself as a bit of a hardnose, so I left to get a job as a male dinner-lady at a posh school. I remember one time, I made the marketing call, and ended up chatting to an old guy on the phone for about half an hour about his work (writing travel brochures), literature, travel, I forget now. Either way I didn’t sell him whatever it was they were selling. It cheered me up though. I sometimes wonder if those cold callers wouldn’t also fancy a nice long chinwag, a chat about the footy, or the state of modern television, just to ease the drudgery of their work. But if they do, I wish they’d stop calling me right in the middle of Jeopardy.
#13 of 30. Still no name for this series. I must get on that. This is my acoustic guitar, the one I bought twelve years ago in Charing Cross Road. It’s lived in a few countries.
#12 of 30. Denmark, the summer of ’95, strawberries, adidas shorts, and those coins with the holes in them. I was only nineteen, but I felt like an old man of nineteen. I learnt a lot of things. I learnt that when traversing Copenhagen station (or any train station), have a bag that has wheels, or at least some sort of discernible shape, one that doesn’t look like you’re hauling a body bag with a live body in it on your shoulders. It took me approximately a day and a half to reach the strawberry farm in the south of the island of Funen from Victoria station in London, which seems an extraordinary amount of time now that we live in the age of budget airlines and long bridges. In 1995, the dreaded Eurolines buses were the way to go, and Denmark was a nation of many ferry rides. It took almost 24 hours to reach Copenhagen, and from there I went via a mixture of trains, ferries, locals buses and a lift from a chip-shop owner, until I pitched my tent in the dark, and proceeded to spend the rest of the summer picking strawberries, busking in the street with my fellow jordbærplukkers and writing postcards.
Sometimes the picking was not good. The farmer, Bjarne (who I was told was nicknamed the Terminator because of his voice), would inspect each punnet, and if he didn’t like what he saw he would admonish you with the slow mechanical line, “many ugly strawberries”. Usually, ugly ones would be eaten mid-pick, since they were juicier, or even used for jam, but you were paid by the kilo, so more often the jordbærplukkers would hide big fat ugly ones under nice tender pretty ones. On the other hand, a nice punnet of shiny, shapely strawbs would be rewarded with a cool “many beautiful strawberries”. Sometimes the work would be frustrating, cold, back-breaking, sometimes it would be hot, back-breaking and frustrating. Often it would be fun though; the other jordbærplukkers, plucked from around the UK and Europe, were a great laugh. Sometimes we would meet the raspberry pickers from a nearby farm, sometimes hang out with locals, such as ‘Scouse’ Claus, who spoke in a broad Liverpool accent but had never been anywhere near the Mersey (he did work on a ferry though). People are very friendly in Denmark, the friendliest country I’ve ever been to.
It really did put me off strawberries though. I had nightmares about them, giant strawbs chasing me down the street, big piles of them every time I closed my eyes. That horrible red juice would just not wash from my hands, leaving me scrubbing like Macbeth for days after the last berry was picked. What little money I had left as the strawb season closed i used to jaunt around the country for a few days, first to Århus in the north, finally to Copenhagen, where I forewent a night in a packed and sweaty hostel, preferring to spend my last few kroner locking up my unwieldy luggage at the station and crooning in a karaoke bar, where locals bought me drinks and told me stories. When the sun came up, I got on a bus to England, with only a single krone left. I put that coin on a piece of string I found, and wore it all the way home, and for some time afterwards. I wonder where it is now.
#11 in the series. I have a box full of old cassettes, ones I’ve owned my whole life. Gonads, that was my band at school; I didn’t sing, but I played the guitar (well, I strummed it and my fingers made chord shapes every so often). The singer, Hooker, was very good. One year he sang in front of the whole school in only his y-fronts, and a beret, if memory serves. I also wrote the songs. Three, four chords. Sometimes we’d just improvise. Once we improvised an entire gospel piece, which still makes me laugh to this day. The song about Jacques Delors was very catchy, and was full of absurdist lyrics parodying the absurd Europhobic headlines of the day, all about banning crisp flavours and killing off willo-the-wisp. We had some of those teenage songs about girls, too, like the ‘Great Unnamed Love Song’, and we covered (rather, absolutely slaughtered beyond recognition) stuff from Sex Pistols to Bryan Adams to Wonderstuff. We were obsessed with ‘Enter the Dragon’. And we had a song about the people who sell the Evening Standard down in London, based pretty much on an encounter we had near Bank station with one particularly incomprehensible vendor. The things that inspire you when you’re fifteen.
Oh we sounded absolutely dreadful, but it was just great fun. Something I’m proud of. If you like I will tell you where you can hear some of it.
petescully 