Tag: davis

she may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid

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nanodrawmo 21

And this project is not even half way over… More fire hydrants, one from UC Davis, the other pair from Fifth Street. I don’t think there are any more designs in Davis, but I’ll keep looking. Of course, different designs will be drawn more than once, in different locations, and of course there are still a great deal of water and gas pipes still to sketch in this town. 23 down, 27 to go. I’m particluarly proud of that top one.

And I will, of course, get around to drawing some other subjects at some point too… 

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and they were all yellow

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Six yellow dwarves, in six yellow caps. Please forgive my use of a Coldplay line in the title. Actually, no that’s not forgivable. It’s just that the line was obvious – they are all yellow, so very yellow after the white and blue hydrants of campus. These are all found in the City of Davis, and are all ‘dry’ hydrants apparently. Oh, they work, but, actually I’m not going to try to explain it. Davis Wiki can do a better job than I. I’ll tell you something though – I found an interesting website all about fire hydrants which at first amazed me in the range of interesting and unusual designs, and then made me jealous that I couldn’t see and sketch them all.
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And then I felt a little like Arnold Rimmer and his collection of 20th century telegraph poles. Oh well, I’m getting to that age where I don’t care about geekery (like I ever really cared) and now fill sketchbooks with fire hydrants and water pipes. To me, though, this is urban sketching at its essence – sketching the urban furniture, the bits that make up the everyday in our towns and cities. Plus look at that one below left. that looks well cool, doesn’t it! And someone has drawn a heart on it, because they must love it so much, huh.

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Anyway, back to them being dwarves. There are six of them, so one is missing obviously. I will call them Stumpy, Grubby, Captain, Constable, Eraser and Beretta. There, they are now christened, and maybe all fire hydrants should have names. Or maybe not. 

So that is 20 of 50 for NaNoDrawMo… more to come!

is it a bird? is it a plane? no, it’s…a pipe

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More pipeage. This colourless specimen above is rather like an industrial era Oliphaunt. This could become a story book for children, ‘the Pipes of Davis’, rather like that book ‘the Toads of Davis’. Although, perhaps the more hippy side of our town might take a different meaning of the word ‘pipe’ and be disappointed to find it’s just all fire hydrants and gas pipes. I wouldn’t market it to the hippies, then. I’m not sure what the story would be about, though. Maybe they could all be super heroes that put out fires, perhaps the gas pipes are the wicked industrial villains who start them, and the super-mutant-ninja-hydrants all save the day.  

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Like these ones for example, they are outside the Center for Neuroscience. Well there’s a super-hero origin story just waiting to happen. All you need is a cape and a wicked laugh. I liked the look of these though, they were like a futuristic space-station or deep-ocean lair.

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This bottom one, though, is small, rather like a simple droid or a techno-hobbit, found on the corner of 3rd and E Streets. I like this one. I sketched it late on Saturday afternoon, when shadows were getting long.

on a steel horse i ride

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Continuing the hydrants, gauges and pipes theme – I will fill an entire sketchbook with these, by the way – for NaNoDrawMo, some of those big big pipes you see all over the place in Davis. They remind me of animals, some elephants, others, horses, others rhinos. Or metal camels. nanodrawmo 9

I feel like a zoologist, but for metal pipes. All of them go into the ground and lead somewhere else. A map of the world by its pipes only would be an interesting map, rather like a drawing of a person only by their veins and arteries.

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we must not look at goblin men

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Expect to see a lot more fire hydrants, sprinkler gauges, gas pipes and other important functional metal poles that stick out of the ground on this site for the next month. I’ve decided to take up the challenge of “NaNoDrawMo“, which like its more famous father NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an offshoot for drawing only. The task is 50 drawings in one month, November. I decided that it might be nice to theme my drawings for this project, and sketch only things in my hydrants/gas pipes/etc category. Here are the first eight, all from UC Davis.

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I particularly like #3, an unusual one, rather like the White Worm poking its way out of the ground. Do you remember that film, Lair of the White Worm? Hugh Grant swashing some buckle, Peter Capaldi before he learnt to swear, Catherine Oxenburg being all Countryfile, plus of course Amanda Donohoe slinking about; naturally my teenage self loved it. Now I draw fire hydrants.

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As I’ve remarked before, they remind me of little gnomes, or dwarves, or goblins, with their funny coloured hats. Or droids. The hydrants on campus tend to be white with blue trim. It’s likely that I’ll draw many which look identical, but I think they all have character. Well, most of them. Well, some of them. Maybe.

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And then there are these two fellows, in red. Up Periscope on the left looks like a character from Button Moon, while on the right that is I think a Sprinkler Gauge. Actually, I have no idea whatsoever. Sprinkler Gauge? They may not even exist. I just guessed at the name. Either way, it’s behind the library. Many more to draw yet – and I’m planning on filling a whole book, a small Cachet watercolour book, which rips my nibs up but loves paint. NaNoDrawMo? November is already looking that much shorter.

take me down to the station

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Davis Amtrak Station

The eleventh spread of the Davis moley, only 1.5 spreads left! It was a bright and sunny Halloween day, warm to boot, and so I went down to the historic Davis Amtrak Station and sat in the sunlight (wearing my Giants cap – hey, no bandwagon-jumping here, I’ve had that for over eight years) (when they were last in the World Series). I sat beside a yellow fire hydrant, which just had to get in there somewhere. And spiderwebs! It’s that time of year here in Davis, when long strands of spiderweb float annoyingly from every tree, lamp-post, fire-hydrant; they just float around in the air, sometimes carrying little spiders with them. I had a few little spiders crawl over my page while drawing this. Well, it is Halloween.

and gathering swallows twitter in the skies

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Funeral Home on D Street

Spread 10 of the Davis Moleskine… this is a funeral home on D Street, sketched from outside the Cafe Mediterranee opposite. I’m struggling to get these sketches in at the moment, splitting them over lunchtimes on different days (they seem to take me longer than usual, I’m still getting used to drawing larger and using these Pitt pens and this paper). I only have two and a half spreads left though! And I think I know what I’m going to draw.

The weather has changed here though. It’s now cold, there is rain, the long-awaited jumpers are out and at last it feels like autumn. Amazing to think that just a couple of weeks ago, it was pushing a hundred degrees.

A funeral home…reminds me of Six Feet Under, that was an enjoyable show to watch, back when we watched it. Never did see the last ones though. We watch Dexter now, that is a great show.

on the buses

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double decker bus

Here in Davis we have a little bit of London. Unitrans has several old vintage London double-deckers which still ride around town, letting passengers hop off the rear deck into the middle of the road, keeping the ‘charming’ London place-names, exotic faraway locales such as Golders Green, Shepherds Bush and Finchley Road. UC Davis brought the buses over in the late 1960s to start a bus service, and these buses are not in fact Routemasters, but the models which came before. Presumably if Boris gets his new modern (ugly, unnecessary, expensive) Routemasters on the streets, Davis will be able to buy some of the bendy-buses.

There are four such buses left in Davis, dating from the late 40s and early 50s. One, the 1950 model, will retire at the end of the year. Maybe they’ll put it out to stud.

Altogether now… “I ‘ate you, Butler!”

bayern some time

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bavarian band at little prague, davis

I had to draw this Bavarian band that has been playing occasionally at Little Prague in Davis during this past month or so for Oktoberfest  – I finally went there to sketch them. They played interesting German-style music, sometimes donning a sombrero to add some Mexican into it. I sketched alongside fellow Davis sketcher Steve, and after the band finished our photos were taken by the singer’s wife with our sketches and the band.

The band wasn’t called ‘Bayern’ by the way, I just felt the need to write that up there. I like Bavaria – my wife and I spent a couple of weeks there back in 2005, partly in Munich, partly driving around the Alpenstrasse, to small towns and lakes, popping into Switzerland (where I spent an afternoon studying the Abrogans, a 1200-year-old manuscript and the oldest thing in German language), and then back into Bayern and up the Romantische Strasse. I loved that each town had its own beer, and we ate only local food (I had the most amazaing roast duck in Schliersee), and castles and timber-framed chalets and the odd hilarious name (there was a mountain called ‘Wank’). And it was truly ‘Bavaria’, not just another part of Germany, it felt like its own country, with that blue and white flag everywhere and the Bavarian dialect everywhere. I wouldn’t mind going back some day.

that is you can’t you know tune in but it’s alright

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little prague tonight

I went out last night to my local pub Little Prague (I’ve sketched there once or twice before) with fellow Davis sketcher Steve Wright, to draw a German band who were playing (I’ll scan that in later) and do some more bar drawing. I decided to do some more paint-splattering on the paper first, since that effect would look good on a theme such as this. I splattered fairly subtle tones, and this made it feel like I was drawing on craft paper rather than in the moleskine, which was a nice feeling. Steve drew into his regular moleskine, and produced some amazing work using both micron pen and watercolours, both of which I had never been able to use in the regular moley – but he made it work really well! Pleasure to sketch with him. I stuck to a sepia wash, still trying to draw bottles (I seem to have some problem with sketching bottles, hence my recent practising). This is a particularly interesting bar area to sketch though, and the bar staff were very friendly and checked up on our sketching progress from time to time.

That beer in the foreground is a Krusovice dark, a very nice beer. You can spot me in the background there.